Getting the recording
Speakers usually get their talk from the organisers as an MP4 after the event, or find it on the conference's YouTube channel weeks later. Attendees often have their own recording made on a phone in the room. Virtual and hybrid events leave a recording on the event platform, typically downloadable as MP4.
Upload the file as it is, or choose Import from link and paste a public YouTube video link; only the audio is fetched, one video at a time. Playlists of a whole conference cannot be imported, but you can queue several links. Private, members-only or age-restricted videos need the file instead.
Room audio versus the soundboard
The best recording comes from the venue's sound desk, which takes the speaker's microphone directly. A phone in the audience records the PA speakers, room echo, applause and people nearby, so quiet passages and audience questions can get lost.
- Speakers: ask the AV team for the board feed or the session video after your talk.
- From the audience, sit near the front and close to a PA speaker, with the phone pointed at it.
- Audience questions asked without a microphone are often inaudible; the speaker repeating the question helps everyone, including the transcript.
- For a noisy hall, try the audio repair switch before transcribing.
What to check
Conference talks are full of product names, research terms, acronyms, people's names and numbers from slides. Click a line to hear it again and fix these in place. Anything that was only on the slides, such as charts, code and links, will not be in the transcript, so add it yourself if your write-up needs it.
For panels, speaker identification labels each panellist and the moderator; it is available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. Rename each label once and the transcript updates.
Exports for speakers, organisers and attendees
One transcript can serve several uses; timestamps and speaker names toggle per export.
- Speakers: DOCX or TXT to turn the talk into a blog post or article, with timestamps off for a clean read.
- Organisers: SRT or VTT captions for the session videos on YouTube or your event site.
- Attendees: Copy into your notes app, or the AI prompt export to paste the talk into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for your own summary.
- Teams sharing what they learned: a read-only share link to the transcript.
Talks in other languages
International events run sessions in many languages, and each talk is transcribed in the language spoken. Choose the language per file, which helps when a talk opens with an English welcome before switching. There is no built-in translation. For talks on YouTube, see the YouTube TED talk and speech transcript pages; for online events, the webinar transcription page.