How to Transcribe a Lecture for Free (Live or Recorded)

To transcribe a lecture, first ask whether it is live or already recorded. Live, run a transcription app on your laptop: its microphone in the hall, the computer’s sound for an online class. For a recording or video, look for captions first (YouTube, your course player), then upload the file to a transcriber such as Word’s Transcribe.

Whichever route you take, check your university’s rules first. Some recording policies name transcription, or AI tools, explicitly (more on that below).

A live transcript has one hard part: getting clean sound into the app. In a hall, the sound reaches your laptop’s microphone from across the room. In an online class, it is the computer’s own sound, which a microphone does not hear.

• Sit near the front, in line with the lecturer, and keep the laptop open and plugged in.
• The microphone sits next to your keyboard, so type softly or take notes on paper.
• Start 30 seconds before the lecture and check that words appear.

Google Docs voice typing is a free option many people try first: open a document, choose Tools, then Voice typing, and click the microphone. Google lists the latest Chrome, Edge and Safari as supported browsers. It is built for dictation, though. Google’s tips ask you to speak clearly at a normal volume and pace, it types straight into the document, its help page describes no way to keep the audio, and punctuation may not be available in every language. A lecturer at the front of a hall is a hard case for it.

Word’s Transcribe (next section) records the microphone and keeps the audio, and so does a dedicated app such as Reline, which lets you replay any line you are unsure of.

When a lecture plays on your computer, the words go to your speakers or headphones, not into your microphone. There are two ways around that:

• Record the computer’s sound directly, with an app that captures system audio, such as Reline’s desktop app (below).
• Or play the lecture through your speakers. For recording calls in Word, Microsoft’s advice is to leave your headset off so the recording picks up the sound coming out of your device. It works, with the room’s noise mixed in.

Word’s Transcribe records live or takes an audio file, then gives you a transcript you can add to the document. Microsoft lists it in Word for the web, which needs the new Microsoft Edge or Chrome, and in Word for Microsoft 365 on Windows for commercial accounts. You sign in with Microsoft 365. On a Mac, that leaves Word for the web in Chrome or Edge.

1. Open a document in Word for the web. On the Home tab, open the arrow next to Dictate, then choose Transcribe.
2. For a live lecture, select Start recording and allow the microphone if the browser asks. For a file, select Upload audio and pick a .wav, .mp4, .m4a or .mp3 file.
3. When a live lecture ends, select Save and transcribe now, and keep the pane open while it works.
4. Fix a section with Edit transcript section, rename Speaker 1 to the lecturer, then select Add all to document.

The monthly limit is on uploads: 300 minutes of uploaded audio with a Microsoft 365 subscription, about six 50-minute lectures, or 30,000 minutes with a Microsoft Copilot license. Microsoft says an upload can take up to about the length of the file to transcribe, and lists more than 80 languages and regional variants. The audio is saved to a Transcribed Files folder in your OneDrive. Word keeps one transcript per document, and starting a new one deletes the old one (text you already added stays), so use one document per lecture.

Before you transcribe anything, check whether a transcript already exists. It often does.

In the video description, click Show transcript. YouTube shows a transcript for any video that has captions, scrolls it along with the video, and jumps to that moment when you click a line. Its automatic captions come from machine learning, and Google warns that they can misrepresent what was said because of accents, dialects or background noise, and may be missing when a video is very long, has poor sound or starts with a long silence. Google’s help page does not describe a download.

Universities often publish recorded lectures through a lecture capture system or a video platform inside the course page, and some of these players can show captions or a transcript. Whether yours does depends on what your university has switched on. Look for a captions or transcript button in the player, and ask the course team or the IT help desk if you cannot find one. If a disability means you need transcripts, the disability services office is the place to ask.

Whisper suits students who are comfortable with a command line: after the install, one command transcribes the file on your own computer, and the --language option sets the lecture’s language. Its README lists six model sizes, from about 1 GB of graphics memory for the smallest to about 10 GB for the largest. Study apps that turn a video into flashcards are compared in our roundup of AI note takers for lectures.

Reline transcribes while it records, and there is no audio or video upload. For a recording you already have, the workaround is to play it on your computer while Reline’s desktop app records the computer’s sound. It runs in real time, so a 90-minute lecture takes 90 minutes, and on the Free plan a note records up to 1 hour. Pause the player when the first note stops, start a second note and play on, or use a paid plan.

Reline (we make it) is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux (beta) that writes a live transcript as the lecturer talks, in 60+ languages with automatic detection. It covers both live cases above, the microphone in the hall and the computer’s sound for an online class, plus the playback route for recordings. You keep the audio, with a play button on every transcript line, and an AI summary sits next to the transcript.

1. Install the Reline app and sign in. The Free plan needs no card.
2. Allow the microphone. For online lectures and recordings, allow system audio too: on a Mac, macOS 14.2 and later ask for an audio-only permission, macOS 13 to 14.1 for the screen recording permission (often followed by a restart of Reline), and before macOS 13 only the microphone is recorded. On Windows, Reline records everything your default output plays, so mute other apps.
3. In Settings, Transcription, leave the Transcription language on Auto-detect for a lecture that switches language, or pick the lecture’s language, and add course terms under Your vocabulary.
4. Press Record when the lecture starts. The transcript appears line by line.
5. Stop at the end. Later, ask the chat a question about the lecture: answers quote the transcript with [m:ss] timestamps.

In a hall, everything comes through one microphone, so the whole transcript is labeled Me. Cannot install anything? Reline also runs in Chrome: it hears your microphone at once, and for a lecture playing in a browser tab you share that tab with its audio.

• Files: there is no audio or video upload, so a recording is transcribed only while it plays, in real time.
• Long lectures on Free: a note records up to 1 hour, and the plan includes 10 hours of transcription, which a term of lectures uses up.
• Phones: there is no mobile app. You record on a laptop or in Chrome.
• Voices in a hall: with one microphone, every line is labeled Me. The beta Shared mic option numbers the voices on that microphone (an estimate), and you name them yourself.
• Slides and video: Reline keeps audio and a transcript, nothing that is on screen.
• Offline use: only the capture happens on your computer.

• Shorten the distance: sit near the front in a hall, and for an online lecture record the computer’s sound directly when your tool can, rather than through speakers and a microphone.
• Set the language: automatic detection helps when a lecturer switches language, but if the whole lecture is in one language, choosing it is safer wherever your tool lets you.
• Teach it the course words: names, formulas read aloud and technical terms are where transcripts slip. In Reline, add them under Your vocabulary.
• Keep the audio: a transcript is a draft. Check names, numbers and definitions against the recording before you study from them.
• One lecture per file or note: shorter pieces are easier to check, and some free plans cap the length anyway.

Usually for your own study, often with conditions, and the rules depend on your university and your country. This is not legal advice. Two real policies show what to look for:

• The University of Calgary’s calendar allows audio recording for individual private study at the instructor’s discretion, and requires the instructor’s written approval for any other use, naming transcription among them.
• The University of Colorado Boulder’s rules for students approved to record limit recordings to personal study, forbid sharing them without the lecturer’s prior written consent, including on the internet and with Artificial Intelligence technologies, and ask students to destroy them at the end of the semester.

The second kind of rule matters here. An online transcription service runs on AI, and that includes Reline, which transcribes in the cloud. Where a rule like that applies, get written consent before you upload a lecture or play it into any of these tools, keep the transcript to yourself, and delete it when the course ends.

A transcript is raw material. Turn it into notes you can revise from, and go back to the audio only for the parts you got wrong:

• Microsoft Support, "Transcribe your recordings": support.microsoft.com
• Google Docs Editors Help, "Type & edit with your voice": support.google.com/docs
• YouTube Help, "View video transcripts" and "Use automatic captioning": support.google.com/youtube
• Otter.ai, "Pricing": otter.ai/pricing
• OpenAI, Whisper README: github.com/openai/whisper
• University of Calgary Calendar, "E.6 Recording of Lectures": calendar.ucalgary.ca
• University of Colorado Boulder Disability Services, "Student Parameters for Recording Class Lectures": colorado.edu/disabilityservices