What Are the Best Apps to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting?

Zoom users often struggle to find the best app to transcribe their meetings. To make it easy for you to choose the best voice to text transcription service for your team, we’ve covered five of the very best apps below. Here’s our guide to finding the transcription service that is right for you.

Why Transcribe Your Zoom Meeting?

If you don’t normally do so, you may be wondering if you really need to transcribe your Zoom meetings. The answer is yes! A transcript of your Zoom meeting recording will automatically make it more accessible to all users, even those with hearing impairments.

Zoom meeting transcripts also allow your team to better concentrate on what you are saying, rather than trying to hurriedly take notes on the last point you were making. This won’t just improve their understanding, it could also help to improve productivity.

Lastly, a transcript of your meeting can also help you to better document what was said. You can use this text for your records or to convert it into another file format to better explain what exactly was said and what future outcomes are to be expected.

The Best Apps to Transcribe Your Zoom Meeting

In such a crowded marketplace, finding the best apps to transcribe your Zoom meeting recordings can be a little hit and miss. Here are the five best transcription services for your next Zoom meeting.

Happy Scribe

Trusted by big names such as the BBC, Spotify, and Fobes, Happy Scribe is an excellent choice if you are looking for highly accurate transcriptions of your Zoom meeting recordings. The company provides both machine and human generated transcripts with fast turnaround times, starting at just a few minutes for automatically generated transcriptions. Ideal if you need your transcript in a hurry.

Happy Scribe also boasts numerous extra features, such as a subtitling and captioning service, human subtitle and transcript translations, share your transcript functionality, multiple file formats and an interactive editor. Unlike most other tools, you pay per minute of audio, so there are no annual or monthly fees. They are currently offering a free trial of their automated service.

Otter AI

Otter AI is a popular subscription service for automatically transcribing Zoom meetings in real time. Otter has a lot of extra tools and features, including a note taking assistant, custom vocabulary, inline image insertion, and the possibility to edit text, speakers and time codes.

This tool is a good choice for businesses with a lot of meetings that require live video transcription as you pay upfront every year rather than for how many minutes your video lasts for. Otter AI can also be used for Google Meet and has numerous integrations. In short, there’s plenty to like.

Fireflies AI

Fireflies AI doesn’t just record and transcribe your meeting, it can also take notes that you can share via Slack, Notion and Asana for more productive meetings. Thanks to its conversation intelligence, you can use Fireflies to track key metrics to better analyse your business and educational meetings.

Fireflies has a monthly subscription plan that is billed annually, although you can get started for free using their limited credits subscription plan. If you have a lot of lengthy meetings and conduct business over multiple platforms, Fireflies could be your best bet as it integrates with Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, and other app platforms.

Rev

If you have a Zoom meeting recording to transcribe, Rev could be one of your top transcription tools. They provide human and machine transcripts and you can also select closed captions or subtitle translation services. Ideal for developers, if you’re into your technology, you may want to check out their speech to text APIs and developer tool documentation.

To start using Rev, you can upload your audio or video recording files via their secure file uploader or add a link to your content. Rev provides a free interactive editor so you can edit and add to your transcript notes as needed, word by word.

Colibri

Colibri is an app that works inside your Zoom interface, so you can record and transcribe your meeting in real time. One of its main advantages is that users can scroll back through your live transcription to check on points that were previously made - something that you cannot do with live captions.

Colibri can also add speaker identification to your transcript document, as well as providing your team with plenty of extra features, such as a highlight function to better share certain aspects of your meeting. You can get started using this app for free or sign up for a monthly or annual plan.

Best Practices for Improving Your Video Transcript

Regardless of whether you are looking for software or human generated transcription services, there are a couple of steps that you can take to ensure that your audio to text files will be of the best quality.

Location

Make sure that you are in the best location for recording your online meeting each and every time, before you hit record. If, for example, you always record from the large office on the second floor, don’t hesitate to move elsewhere if there is a lot of noise from roadworks today. Sometimes our habits can take precedence over common sense. Assess the amount of background noise and ask yourself if there is a quieter or more secluded spot from where you could host your meetings.

Speak Clearly

You may think that this goes without saying, but it really is important to take your time and ensure that you pronounce each and every word. While you don’t want your voice to sound like a robot, speaking clearly will improve the quality of your recordings and make it easier for your online participants to better understand exactly what you are saying. Good enunciation will ensure that your software generated transcriptions are automatically more accurate.

Pause Between Speakers

When you hand the floor over to a colleague, make sure that there is a defined pause between your final word and their introductory words. Otherwise, if you both talk at the same time, even for just a couple of seconds, your transcription is going to suffer. Not only will it be very difficult for a human transcriptionist to document what was said, any AI software is also going to struggle. What’s more, automatic audio to text transcriptions may fail to note the change of speaker if you both talk at the same time without an effectively demarcated handover.

Choose a High-Quality Transcription Service

Signing up with a quality transcription service, such as Happy Scribe, will automatically ensure that you get highly accurate transcriptions. When you select a specialist service, your audio and video meeting recordings will need much less editing than if you use standard voice to text software.

There are a lot of different transcription tools to choose from. Not everyone has the same needs when it comes down to transcribing a Zoom meeting, so make sure that the tool that you go for has all of the essential features that your team requires. You may want to try out a free offer so you can get to grips with using transcription software and find out which tool you like best.