Which tool can I use to transcribe a Zoom meeting or webinar for free?

Whether you’re hosting a Zoom meeting with your work colleagues or creating a webinar, an accurate transcription is a must. Yet finding the best transcription service for free or on a budget can be a challenge with so many options and offers available. Save time searching the web with our guide to the very best Zoom transcription services that are completely free or come with a free trial option.

Why transcribe your Zoom Meeting or Webinar?

Transcribing your Zoom presentation or recording is a great way to make your video more accessible to a greater number of people. What’s more, it also means that your recording can be easily searched for specific terms. This will allow your team members to focus on the important parts that they need to watch again.

Aside from better documenting your recordings, a Zoom transcript can be really useful to send to colleagues and subscribers who cannot access your live recording due to technical difficulties, time zone differences or account problems. On screen captions are also essential for those with hearing impairments or attention deficiency problems, making your presentation automatically more inclusive.

Top 5 free Zoom transcription tools

If you are just starting out transcribing your Zoom meetings, you may want to try out a free-of-charge service before you commit to paying. To help you to find the best free Zoom transcription tool for your recordings, we’ve listed the top five services below. Read on to find out some of the best deals for Zoom transcripts.

Zoom Live transcription

If you’re on a very tight budget and don’t need professional-level transcriptions, you may want to try using Zoom’s native Live Transcription. It is completely free and you can simply enable it in your settings as host for live captions and transcriptions.

While this is one of Zoom’s most useful new features, being easy to enable with a simple click, it is not the most accurate transcription service. So you should expect to put aside plenty of time to edit your transcriptions. These are automatically generated when your meetings are recorded to the cloud. In addition, you’ll need to assign someone to type the audio manually online if you are using breakout rooms, as they are not supported by this feature.

It is also worth noting that the native Live Transcription service generates separate VTT text files that may not be supported by all platforms, notably most social media channels. In this case, you’ll need to convert your files to SRT format after editing.

Happy Scribe

For high accuracy levels at a low price, more and more Zoom hosts are turning to Happy Scribe. Its automatic transcription and subtitling software comes with a free-of-charge trial so you check out the quality before you buy.

Happy Scribe also provides human-made transcriptions and translations - ideal if you are looking for the highest quality audio subtitles for your webinar. Trusted by big names such as the BBC, Forbes, and the UN, this certainly is a big name in the industry.

One of the most popular features is its interactive editor, giving you complete control over your transcriptions. What’s more, you can download your transcription files in multiple formats, making this service compatible with all types of platforms.

Riverside

This app provides fast, automatic machine-generated audio transcriptions. They have a free price plan that gives you up to two hours of separate audio and video tracks as a one-off offer. Afterwards, you can choose from one of their monthly subscription plans depending on how many hours you need transcribing each month.

Their software can transcribe up to seven different speakers, making it a good choice for small Zoom meetings. Make sure that you start to record in high resolution for better accuracy levels.

If you don't need multiple file formats you may want to give this app a try. Riverside provides transcripts in SRT format, plus you can also download your transcript as plain text files so you can use them for other purposes.

Grain

Grain is a new service, primarily designed to automate your note taking and record keeping through AI. It is easy to use and highly accessible with numerous native integrations.

This company provides a free version of their tool that can be used for up to 50 meetings of up to five participants. You should, however, bear in mind that if you want to access advanced settings, extra media features or to remove the watermarks from your meeting transcripts, you will need to upgrade to a monthly subscription plan.

With more than 50,000 users, Grain is definitely a popular choice. If you are looking for an extremely cost-effective way to create personal notes during your Zoom team meetings, then you will really like this online tool.

Otter

For recordings and meetings under 30 minutes long, Otter’s cost-free basic plan provides up to 300 monthly minutes. So, it could be just what you need for quick Zoom calls, although you’ll probably want to sign up for a subscription or to use another tool for long meetings in the cloud and your Zoom webinars.

Otter can add live captions for Zoom meetings, plus it also has a handy assistant to make it a little easier to use and edit. You can import all of your meeting recordings in the form of audio or video files for transcription in one easy step.

Signing up for Otter’s paid business account unlocks extra features including custom vocabulary, custom speakers, and usage analytics. However, if you want to use Otter for free, it is best suited for quick conference calls on Zoom.

Summary

There is no shortage of transcription tools on the market. If you are still searching for the best free app to transcribe your Zoom recordings, meetings and webinars, you could always get started with the native Live Transcription service, provided that accuracy is not essential. Otherwise, select one of the above audio and video transcription companies for a more accurate and professional service to add extra value to your recordings and live video.