How to Transcribe a Google Meet Recording

Who can record, and where the file goes

Recording in Google Meet depends on your Google Workspace edition and your organisation's admin settings; not every account has it. When a meeting is recorded:

• The recording is saved to the meeting organiser's Google Drive, in a folder named Meet Recordings.
• The organiser and the person who started the recording receive an email with a link.
• The recording link is usually added to the Calendar event, so invited participants can find it, subject to sharing settings.

If you can't find a recording, check the organiser's Drive first; it isn't stored in the Drive of whoever pressed record if they weren't the organiser.

Meet's own transcripts

On some Workspace editions, Meet can create a transcript during the meeting and save it as a Google Doc in the same Meet Recordings folder. It's convenient when available, but it covers a limited set of spoken languages and must be turned on during the meeting. A separate tool makes sense when your edition doesn't include transcripts, nobody turned them on, the meeting was in a language Meet doesn't transcribe, or you need subtitle files or a translation.

Download the recording

1. Open the organiser's Google Drive and the Meet Recordings folder (or follow the link in the email).
2. Right-click the recording and choose Download. You'll get an MP4.
3. If you don't have download permission, ask the organiser to share the file with download access or to download it for you.

Recordings of long meetings can be large. Because only the sound matters for a transcript, extracting the audio or using the free MP4 to MP3 converter in your browser turns a big video into a small audio file first.

Transcribe it with mydubly

1. Open video to text and add the MP4. The video stays on your device; only the extracted audio is sent.
2. Choose the spoken language, or another language for a translated transcript.
3. Download the plain transcript, the timestamped transcript, and SRT or VTT subtitles.

It costs 1 credit per minute, with 100 free credits when you sign in with Google, for recordings up to 2 hours. Translations come from the same run at no extra cost; each run produces one target language.

Sharing the result responsibly

Recordings of classes and meetings include other people's voices and sometimes their faces and names. Before transcribing and sharing, check your school's or organisation's rules on recordings. Share transcripts with the same audience as the recording, and delete copies you no longer need. With mydubly, the audio and results are deleted within 30 minutes of delivery; on-device video privacy explains why the video itself never leaves your computer.

Limits and accuracy

• No speaker labels in mydubly transcripts. Add names while proofreading if it matters; for interviews, the first few words of each speaker usually make it clear.
• Laptop microphones in echoing rooms and people talking over each other reduce accuracy. Speech recognition and background noise covers what helps.
• Meetings longer than 2 hours need splitting.
• Live captions during Meet are a separate feature; mydubly works on the recording afterwards.

Next steps with the transcript

A full transcript is searchable, quotable and easy to summarise. Meeting recording to notes turns it into minutes and action items; for classes, lecture video to notes turns it into study material. The meeting transcription page covers the routine for teams that record every week.

Meetings held in two languages

Some Meet calls switch languages: a project review in English with a side discussion in Spanish, or a family call in Hindi and English. The spoken language is detected from the audio, and stretches in a second language may be transcribed less consistently. If one language dominates, choose it; if the meeting splits cleanly in two halves, split the recording and run each half with its own language. Translating mixed-language videos covers the options.

A routine for recurring meetings

For a weekly meeting, settle the routine once: who records, who downloads, where transcripts are stored and how long they're kept. Name files with the date and meeting name so they sort correctly, and keep transcripts in a shared folder that respects the same access as the recordings. After a few weeks, searching meeting recordings shows how a folder of transcripts becomes a searchable record of decisions.