Transcribe lectures for students

Ask before you record

Whether you may record a lecture is decided by your lecturer and your institution, and the rules differ widely. Some courses encourage recording, some allow it for personal study only, some ban it. Ask first, keep the recording and the transcript for your own use, and do not share or post them without permission. If a lecture is recorded by the university and you are given the file, you still need to follow whatever terms came with it. We do not take links to lecture portals: you upload a file you are entitled to have.

From recording to study notes

1. Record close to the speaker, or download the class recording if your course provides one.
2. Upload the file above. Set the spoken language if the lecture is not in English.
3. Read the transcript with the slides open and correct terms, names and formulae first, because those are where automatic transcription slips.
4. Turn the text into notes: headings for each topic, definitions in your own words, questions for the tutor.
5. Export as plain text or Markdown for your notes app.

Searching beats re-listening

Each line carries a timestamp, so a search for a term tells you where in the recording it was said. With an account, search works across every lecture you have transcribed, which is handy when revising a topic that came up three times across a term. Subtitle files (SRT or VTT) are rarely needed for study, and you can ignore that export unless you are captioning a video yourself.

Drafts you review

The transcript is a draft, not a record. Numbers read aloud, equations, chemical or medical terms, foreign names and anything you will be examined on need checking against the audio and your course material. A wrong word in a transcript can become a wrong fact in your notes, so never revise from the text alone.

Long lectures and group sessions

Without an account one file can be up to 15 minutes and 25 MB. A free account lifts those per-file limits and keeps your transcripts in a library you can search, so for a full-length recording create one instead of cutting the file up. In seminars with several speakers, speaker labels (up to eight) come with a free account; students at the back of the room are the roughest lines because distance and echo cost more accuracy than anything else. Read the lecture guide for recording tips.