How do you transcribe a Zoom audio or video recording?

You transcribe a Zoom recording by giving its audio to a transcription tool. The file is the same whether it came from Zoom or from your own device. A recording you made to your computer gives you an audio-only file named audio_only.m4a by default ¹. A video recording gives you an MP4 file named zoom_0.mp4 by default ², and most transcription tools accept that too. Wait for Zoom to finish before you open the file, then transcribe it and check the result against the recording.

The route depends on where the recording lives. If you recorded to your computer, you already have the file. If the recording is in Zoom's cloud, download it from the web portal first. Zoom's own transcript, if your account makes one, is a separate file that needs no transcription at all.

Find the file Zoom saved on your computer

Zoom saves a computer recording in a folder, and by default the folder is Zoom inside your Documents folder. On Windows the path is C:\Users\ [your name]\Documents\Zoom. On a Mac it is /Users/ [your name]/Documents/Zoom ³.

Zoom does its processing after the meeting ends. The page we read says Zoom converts the recording so you can access the files once the meeting has ended ⁴. Do not open the folder in the middle of the meeting and expect a finished file.

Keep the computer awake until the conversion finishes. The same university page warns that if the meeting shuts down unexpectedly, or the conversion is interrupted, the recording files could become corrupted and non-recoverable ⁵. Shut the laptop down only after the file opens and plays.

Transcribe the audio file

1. Open the audio-only file to check that it plays and has the whole meeting. If the audio is missing, the recording did not finish.
2. Choose a transcription tool. A browser tool such as free audio to text can take one saved file. Our guide to how to transcribe audio to text compares the other routes.
3. Upload or drop the file into the tool, select the spoken language, and start the transcription.
4. Save the text, then compare the first few minutes with the recording before you trust the rest.

The tool matters. A 2024 study of university lecture recordings found English word error rates of 2.9 percent for Whisper large-v2 ⁶ and 20.1 percent for Google ⁷. A lecture is not a meeting, and services change, so the figures are only a guide. The word error rate on your own meeting audio is the number that matters.

Cloud recordings and Zoom's own transcript

A cloud recording lives in Zoom's cloud, and it is the only kind of recording that Zoom's own audio transcript is made from. A recording saved to your computer gets no Zoom transcript, even when the transcript setting is on ⁸.

If your account has the audio transcript turned on, Zoom automatically transcribes cloud recordings ⁹. In that case, you may not need a tool at all. For the download steps, read how to download a Zoom transcript. If the cloud recording has no transcript, download the recording from the web portal and transcribe the file the same way as a computer recording.

If you have no recording at all, Zoom's captions can only give you text during the meeting. Read whether Zoom can transcribe without recording for that route.

Computer recordings need no paid plan

Computer recording is open to free accounts. Zoom says the feature is available to both free and paid subscribers ¹⁰. So a free account can record a meeting to its computer and transcribe the file afterwards, unless an admin has turned computer recording off.

What to check before you share the text

Automatic transcripts make predictable mistakes. Names, product names, numbers, dates and technical terms are the first things to fix. Listen to the parts of the meeting where people talk over each other, because overlapping speech is hard for any tool. For a transcript with labels for each speaker, the speaker diarization entry explains what the tool must do, and our guide to timestamps and speaker labels covers how to add them.

Recordings can contain personal data. Check your organization's rules before you upload a meeting to an online tool, and delete the copies you no longer need.

Related steps are in how to turn off transcription in Zoom, and the overview of Zoom, Teams and Google Meet transcription shows which platform keeps its transcript where. For longer files, see our guide to video to text.