Recording

Manual recordings

Start recording from the menu captures your microphone until you choose Stop & process. That is the whole interaction. Use it for a voice note, a thought you don't want to lose, or a conversation in the room.

Recording calls

Leave Auto on and Transcripts watches for calls. When you join a Teams, Zoom, Webex or Meet call and your microphone goes live, it starts recording — and it records both sides: your microphone and the audio of the call, as two separate tracks mixed into one file.

Two tracks matter more than it sounds. Because your voice arrives on its own track, every word of yours is known to be yours with no guesswork. All the uncertainty about who said what is confined to the other side. A single mixed recording throws that away.

When the call ends, recording stops and processing begins.

Consent

Recording law varies by country and by state. Some places allow one participant to record; others require everyone to agree.

Settings ▸ General has a Consent mode:

• One-party — Transcripts records a detected call automatically.
• Two-party — Transcripts notifies you first and records nothing until you confirm you have told everyone.

Two-party mode is the honest default in jurisdictions that require all-party consent. Transcripts gives you a recorder; whether you may lawfully use it on a given conversation is yours to judge.

When the microphone is dead

A surprising number of lost recordings are not lost at all — they are silent, because the input was a webcam microphone on a closed laptop lid, or a headset that disconnected.

Transcripts watches for this. If the level stays at nothing while it is supposed to be recording, it tells you rather than handing you a silent file an hour later. Settings ▸ General lets you nominate preferred microphones in order, so a good one is chosen when it is present.

Pausing, and what happens if things go wrong

Audio is written to disk continuously, not held in memory and saved at the end. If the app quits, the machine sleeps, or the power goes, the audio recorded up to that moment survives, and Transcripts offers to resume the take when it starts again.

Next: The live transcript