How to Transcribe a Zoom meeting or Recording (for Free)

It’s 2022. Remote work is the new normal. Naturally, every important discussion now happens on Zoom and yet when the meeting is done, we move on to the next meeting or task. Most of the knowledge shared in that meeting is lost in the ether. Put it another way, you’ll permanently lose the action items, hard-earned insights, and decisions. 

Zoom Transcription

Transcribing and indexing Zoom meetings turned out to be the solution to preserve the insights and takeaways from your online meetings. Meeting transcripts also make the conversation much more accessible for people from various backgrounds, abilities, and learning styles. 

As Kristen Gallagher, CEO of Edify puts it, transcribing meetings helps you meet the employees where they are. 

“I have really seen that people are more motivated, productive, and work better together when you are meeting them where they are. This involves taking the time to understand people and their learning styles, as well as potentially making some changes to your communication workflow that are more supportive and more inclusive of that team.”

- Kristen Gallagher, CEO, and founder of Edify.

Now comes the question of how to transcribe zoom meetings. 

Previously, Zoom users would have to record a meeting, send it to a Zoom transcription service, pay for them to transcribe it, and then wait until they got back. Well, not anymore. Transcribing Zoom meetings has become much easier with Grain. 

‍Grain is a tool that enables you to record, transcribe, clip, and share the important moments from Zoom calls in real-time.

We have talked about the best zoom transcriptions services in our blog extensively before. In this post, we’ll show how you can get transcripts of zoom recordings using Grain and review the usability of Zoom’s native transcription feature. 

Alright, let’s get started. 

How to Transcribe a Zoom Meeting

• Create a Grain account
• Import or Upload Your Zoom Recording
• Transcribe Your Meeting ‍‍

Step 1: Create a Grain account

Sign up for Grain using your Google or Outlook account. Once you’re in, you can create a workspace and invite your team members to join (optional). Grain workspace will save your recordings along with transcripts for you to use whenever you need them.

‍‍Step 2: Import or Upload Your Recording

Right after creating your workspace, you’ll see an option to upload a zoom recording from your desktop or connect your Zoom Account and import the recordings from Zoom Cloud.

If you want to transcribe recorded meetings stored in your Zoom Cloud account, then you can easily import them into Grain for transcription with a few clicks. Once you connect your Zoom Account, you’ll see a list of recordings available in your Zoom Cloud, ready to import. Hit “Import” to import any recording.

Sidenote: You can automatically import new recordings from Zoom as well. Go to Settings > Integrations > Zoom > Settings > Select “Auto-import Zoom recordings”.

Step 3: Transcribe Your Meeting

As soon as you upload or import, Grain will automatically transcribe your meeting in a preferred language (set to ‘English’ by default). In a minute, your Zoom transcript will be ready for you to edit and download. 

If you'd like to see a quick demo on how to transcribe meetings using Grain, here you go:

Edit your transcript:‍

Click on the edit icon you see just below the video player and then you’ll have an option to select and edit individual words in the transcript. 

Remove filler words:‍

Grain will automatically remove filler words like “umm” and “uhhs” from the transcript. You can disable/enable this feature by going to Account Settings > Recordings > Transcription. 

Download your Zoom transcript:

‍You can use the more option right next to the "correct transcript" icon to download your transcript in a format of your own choice. Grain lets you export the meeting transcript in Pdf, Srt, Vtt, and Docx. In other words, you can transcribe zoom meetings to text or word for free using Grain. 

Transcribe your zoom meetings in different languages:

Grain can transcribe your zoom meetings in English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, and Turkish.

To turn on transcription support in another language, go to your Account Settings > Recordings > Transcription > select your preferred language.

You can log in to your Grain workspace anytime you would like to watch your recordings and get the transcripts. You can follow the same steps to transcribe your interviews as well.

Enabling Live Transcription for Your Zoom Meetings

Some prefer to have live meeting transcriptions to keep up with the discussion, capture and share interesting insights, and take notes. If you need live transcription for your Zoom meeting, all you need to do is record using Grain. 

When the meeting starts, copy its link. Log into your Grain workspace, go to the Record Call page and you’ll find a field to drop the Zoom meeting link or ID. 

Paste the copied meeting link and voila, your Grain recording bot will join the call to record and transcribe the meeting in real-time. You can look at the live transcript by going to Library > Personal tab > Recordings > Open.

Sidenote: Grain recorder will join as a meeting participant to record the call. This means the host has to admit the bot to start recording the conversation. 

As the conversation begins, you can see the transcripts with speaker labels. 

Automatically Transcribe Your Zoom Meetings

If you need to transcribe Zoom meetings multiple times a week, then you can automate the whole process. Download our desktop app (available for both Mac and Windows) and sign in with Zoom. Now whenever you create a meeting, the Grain app will pop up to ask your permission to record your meetings. Just press “Record”.

As soon as the meeting starts, Grain will automatically record and transcribe the Zoom call. You can visit grain.com/recordings and click on any of your recordings to see its transcript available for you to edit and download.

Grain Transcription Vs Zoom Native Transcription

As you might already know, Zoom offers a native audio transcription tool for its licensed users. More specifically, you need to have a Business, Education, or Enterprise license to use native transcription.

While Zoom’s native transcription is accurate, it isn’t easy to read, use, and share. 

First things first. To enable Zoom transcription, log into your Zoom account > go to Settings > Recordings > check “create audio transcript”.

How to get your transcript from zoom?

When the meeting ends, you can log into your Zoom account and go to Recordings > Open the recording you’d like to see the transcript of > download closed captions.

Note that if you aren’t recording to Cloud, then the meeting transcript won't be saved. It’s also worth noting that the transcript will be available only from the moment you start recording.

‍How long does it take for zoom to transcribe a recording?‍

If your meeting is 30 minutes long, then it would typically take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes for Zoom to process the recording and the transcript. In some cases, Zoom might take additional time to process the meeting transcript after processing your cloud video/audio recording.

Comparing Transcripts from Grain and Zoom

Pricing: Grain can transcribe up to 10 video or audio meetings for free. You’ll also have a 30-day business trial that offers unlimited transcription. Zoom auto-transcription is only available for users with a Business, Education, or Enterprise license. If you’re a Zoom user with a free account, you can’t use the feature. 

‍Accuracy: Determining the accuracy is quite difficult as, ultimately, it depends on input audio quality, compression, sampling rate, reverberation, and more. When we compared both, Grain transcripts are slightly more accurate than Zoom. 

‍Language Support: As we mentioned above, Grain supports several languages. Zoom, on the other hand, currently supports only English.

‍Readability: Though both Grain and Zoom identify different speakers in the call and include speaker labels in their transcripts, Grain’s transcript is more readable. The structure of the transcript from Grain is natural and more human-centric than that of Zoom’s.👇

Format: You can download the transcript in multiple formats using Grain. Zoom only offers VTT format.

‍Shareability: With Grain, you can easily share the whole transcript or clip and share key moments from your meetings in short video clips. Zoom transcripts are only shareable as a whole. 

‍Filler words: Grain removes filler words from your transcript whereas Zoom doesn’t.

Processing time: Grain transcripts are available instantly after the meeting. Typically, you can just open the recording, edit, and download the transcript without any delay. Zoom transcripts take some time to process and aren’t available right after the call. 

Easiest way to Transcribe Zoom Meetings

Grain is the easiest way to transcribe zoom meetings. Whether you’re looking to transcribe an upcoming meeting or a recording file stored in your Zoom Cloud/local drive, Grain has got you covered. Live transcripts, automatic speaker detection, multiple language support, filler word removal, and several other features make Grain a preferred choice for zoom meeting transcription.

It’s free to get started and affordable to upgrade when you need unlimited transcription.