How to Get a Transcript From a Zoom or Google Meet Recording

Online meetings solved recording and left transcription half-done. The file exists; the words usually do not.

Finding the recording

Zoom. A local recording lands in a Zoom folder in your documents, as an MP4 plus an M4A audio-only file. Cloud recordings live in your Zoom account under Recordings. If you have the M4A, use it — it is the audio without the video wrapped around it.

Google Meet. Recordings go to the organiser's Drive, in a Meet Recordings folder. Download the MP4 rather than transcribing from a shared link.

Either way, upload the file directly. You do not need to extract audio from an MP4 first.

Why the built-in captions often disappoint here

Both platforms offer live captions, and on a call conducted entirely in one accent of English they are reasonable.

Nigerian calls are frequently not that. The moment somebody drops into Pidgin, or a name like Adeyemi or Okonkwo comes up, live captioning tends to produce something phonetically nearby. Live captioning also has to commit to a word before the sentence finishes, which removes exactly the context that resolves ambiguity — the trade-off is explained in real-time vs batch transcription.

Transcribing the recording afterwards reads the whole thing before committing, which is why the result usually differs.

Speaker labels

A meeting transcript without speaker labels is close to useless — you cannot tell a proposal from an objection.

Two things make labelling work better. Ask people to avoid talking over each other, since overlapping speech is genuinely hard to separate. And have everyone say their name at the start, which gives you an anchor when you review. More detail in speaker diarization.

Audio quality on calls

Online meetings have a particular failure: one participant on a bad connection ruins that participant's audio permanently. Compression artefacts and dropouts cannot be recovered afterwards, because the words never arrived.

If a call genuinely matters, ask people to use headphones. A headset microphone sits near the mouth and away from the speakers, which removes both the room and the echo.

Turning it into something useful

Most meeting recordings are transcribed for one of three reasons: a decision record, action items, or so somebody who missed it can catch up.

All three are better served by notes than by forty pages of dialogue. Generate the summary and action list from the transcript, then keep the full text as the searchable record underneath — the thing you go back to when people disagree about what was agreed.

There is more on that in what to do with a transcript, and on running this regularly with a team in meeting transcription tips for Nigerian teams.

Starting

A free account includes transcription minutes each month with no card. Sign up and run your last real meeting through it.