Recordings and transcripts

Record a meeting, a lecture or a thought inside a note, and get a written transcript of it.

Record in a note

Open the note.
Tap or click the 🎙 button in the note's bar. You can also type /record and choose the row.
When you're done, stop the recording.

A transcript of the recording follows automatically. If no speech was recognized in it, the recording's card says so.

While you type, the recording's bar sits above the formatting bar over the keyboard, so you can pause or stop without leaving the note.

Start a recording in a new note

The orange button with the microphone makes a note named for today's date, opens it and starts recording at once.

The orange button is at the top of the sidebar, beside the blue and the green ones.

Touch and hold the blue circle at the bottom of the screen, then tap the recording button that rises above it.

For a meeting, choose Start Recording on the meeting's card in Calendar, or Record under a meeting that is still to come on Home. The note is named after the meeting and linked to it.

While it records

The recording's bar shows the last few seconds of sound as a red wave, and the time recorded so far.

Choose the microphone with the microphone button in the bar. Automatic follows the system — AirPods put in or taken out — and names the microphone it means right now; under it is every microphone the device has. The choice takes effect at once, in the same recording, and is remembered for the next one. A chosen microphone that is unplugged doesn't stop the recording; it carries on through Automatic.
Nothing heard for five seconds, and the wave lies flat and grey and the bar says No sound — check the microphone. The recording goes on, and the warning goes as soon as sound comes in.
A phone call or Siri pauses the recording. Tap resume to go on.
A second tap on the 🎙 button while the recording is starting does nothing, so you don't start two.

The same menu has System Audio. Turned on, the recording hears what the Mac plays as well — the other side of a Teams or Zoom call, even in headphones — mixed with the microphone into one recording and one transcript. With it on, None appears among the microphones, for a recording of the Mac alone. macOS may ask once for permission to record system audio.

The bar takes two rows: the title and the time on top, the wave, the microphone, pause and stop under them — so neither the title nor the time is cut, whatever your text size.

If a recording can't start, NotaBene says why. Microphone Access Is Off comes with a button that takes you to the setting where you turn it on. Recording Couldn't Start means another app is using the microphone.

Play a recording

Click or tap the play button on the recording. Under it, the time played is on the left and the time left on the right.

Drag the slider — or click or tap anywhere along it — to go to that place in the recording. It works before you start playing, too.
⟲15 goes back fifteen seconds and 15⟳ goes ahead fifteen seconds.

Choose the transcription language

Go to Settings ▸ Language ▸ Transcription Language and pick the language your recordings are spoken in. Automatic uses the language of your device's region — Czech in the Czech Republic, whatever language the device is shown in. When speech recognition doesn't know that language it uses the device's language, and American English when it knows neither.

The setting applies to this device only, like Dictation. Transcripts you already have stay as they are. Regenerate Transcript makes a recording's transcript again; if it already has one, NotaBene asks first, because the new transcript replaces it.

Tip: Search finds a recording by its name and by anything said in its transcript.

Note: Apple Watch has no recorder — on the watch you dictate a note instead.

See Also: Meeting notes · Search · Settings · The window at a glance