Transcription Overview

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Transcription must be enabled
Transcripts are not generated for meetings by default.
To generate a transcript, you must be configure a transcription method.

Quickstart

If you're looking for the fastest way to get started with transcription, use these guides:

Bots: Follow the Recall.ai Transcription guide
Desktop Recording SDK: Follow the Desktop SDK Real-Time Transcription guide

How does Recall transcribe meetings?

One of the main use cases of meeting recording is to get an accurate, speaker-attributed transcript. Recall handles the this process for you: it captures audio/video from meetings, routes it to your chosen speech-to-text provider, applies speaker attribution, and delivers the transcript in a consistent format. The two diagrams below provide a high-level overview of how Recall transcribes meetings, both during the call and after the call has ended:

Transcription Providers

Recall allows you to choose between several different transcription options, depending on your use case:

Recall.ai Transcription : Transcription directly through Recall.ai

Third-Party Transcription: Through one of our transcription partners

Meeting Caption Transcription: Using native meeting platform captions

Recall will return transcripts in the same API response format no matter which of these you use, so feel free to test each of them out.

Which provider should I use?

Transcription Method	Pros	Cons
Recall.ai Transcription	Zero work to set up an integration More accurate / higher quality transcriptions Multiple language support	Costs additional money
Third-Party Transcription	Advanced features such as custom word dictionaries and spelling Typically more accurate/higher quality Can support multi language transcripts depending on the provider	Costs additional money
Meeting Captions	Free	Only available for real-time transcription Can be lower quality depending on the platform Not 100% reliable since meeting captions can depend on user/org settings No multilingual support

Third-Party Transcription Providers

The following is a list of officially-supported third-party transcription providers. While we support real-time and async transcription on both meeting bots and the Desktop Recording SDK, some providers are not available for real-time on the Desktop SDK yet.

Transcription Provider	Async Transcription (all)	Realtime Transcription (Bots)	Realtime Transcription (Desktop SDK)
Assembly AI	✅	✅	✅
Deepgram	✅	✅	✅
Gladia	✅	✅	✅
AWS Transcribe	❌	✅	❌
Rev	✅	✅	❌
Speechmatics	✅	✅	❌

Transcription Methods

Recall supports transcription both in real time and after the call ends. Choose real-time when you need the transcript as soon as possible, and choose async for best final transcript quality.

Real-time transcription

Real‑time transcription is delivered continuously during the call via webhook or websocket. See the following guides for how to implement real-time transcription for both bots and the Desktop Recording SDK:

Bot Real-Time Transcription

Desktop SDK Real-time Transcription

Async transcription

Post-call transcription yields the highest overall transcription quality, so you should prefer this method unless you need the transcript data in real time. The implementation for async transcription is the same for both bots and the Desktop Recording SDK, so you can follow this guide:

Async Transcription

Diarization

Diarization is the process of determining who said what in a transcript. Recall automatically diarizes transcripts using a method called speaker timeline diarization, but there are other options available. Read more about this here:

Diarization