Lecture Recording to Text

Notes you did not have to take

Writing while listening splits attention; most students end up with half a page of fragments and a recording they never replay. A transcript flips that: the lecture is read in a quarter of the time it took to give, the definitions are exact, and searching for the one term the exam will ask about takes a second. This page gives you the first 5 minutes of a recording as text so you can see what the full transcript would look like.

Recording a lecture that transcribes well

Accuracy depends more on the recording than on the engine. Sit in the first third of the room, put the phone on the desk rather than in a bag, and stop the recording during breaks so the file does not fill with chair noise. A lecturer with a lapel microphone is the best case; a large hall with the phone at the back is the worst. Questions from the audience are usually too quiet to transcribe — the answers are not.

What the preview does with the file

Your browser reads the recording and keeps the first 5 minutes; for a longer file it cuts the audio locally and re-encodes that part as 16 kHz mono WAV, so a 90-minute lecture is never uploaded whole. The 5 minutes go over an encrypted connection to the transcription engine behind the SozAI app (AssemblyAI). The language is detected automatically across 99 languages — a chemistry lecture in Spanish and a law lecture in German need no settings — and the lecturer is separated from anyone else who speaks. When the text is on your screen, the audio and transcript are deleted at the provider.

Formats and limits

• M4A, MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, OGG/OPUS, WEBM, up to 25 MB as-is. Longer recordings are trimmed to 5 minutes in the browser first (files up to 30 MB on a computer, 12 MB on a phone).
• Three previews per device per day, no account.
• A 90-minute lecture recorded on a phone is typically 60–90 MB: too large to trim in the browser, and the right job for the app.

The full lecture, every week

The SozAI app records the whole session or imports the file, labels the speakers, and turns the transcript into a summary and study notes. Every lecture stays in a searchable library, so revising for the exam means searching for a term, not scrubbing through audio. The first 30 minutes are free.