How to transcribe a meeting in real time

2026-08-12

Meeting transcription splits into two approaches, and they are good at different things. Choosing badly is usually why the transcript ends up unread in a folder.

Live transcription: for when you need it during the meeting

Text appears as people speak. The value is not the file you get afterwards - it is what you can do while the meeting is still running:

• Scroll back thirty seconds when you miss a number, without asking anyone to repeat themselves.
• Catch up after joining late, by reading what you missed.
• Look something up mid-call without leaving the meeting.

The trade-off is accuracy. A live system has to commit to words as it hears them, with no benefit of hindsight, so it will get more wrong than a system processing the whole recording afterwards.

Uploading a recording: for when you need the record

Processing a finished file is more accurate, because the system can use context from the whole recording to resolve ambiguity. It is also where the useful post-processing lives: a summary, a breakdown by topic, a translation.

This is the right choice when the point is the artefact - minutes, a summary for people who missed it, a searchable record of a decision.

What actually determines accuracy

In practice the model matters less than the audio. In rough order of impact:

• Microphone distance. One laptop mic in the middle of a table is the single biggest source of errors.
• People talking over each other. Overlapping speech is genuinely hard.
• Background noise - air conditioning, cafes, a road outside the window.
• Names, jargon and acronyms, which no general model has seen in your context.

If a transcript comes back poor, changing tools rarely helps as much as moving the microphone closer.

Getting something you will actually use

A raw hour-long transcript is close to useless - nobody reads 9,000 words to find one decision. What makes it useful is structure: a short summary at the top, the transcript split by topic, and the ability to ask it questions rather than scrolling.

Decide up front which of the two you need. If you want help during the meeting, transcribe live. If you want a record afterwards, record and upload - you will get a better transcript and the summary that makes it readable.