Record and transcribe meetings

Meetings and Recordings records a meeting, a call, or a voice note and transcribes it as people speak. When you stop, the audio and transcript are saved to your account, and you can name speakers, get a summary, copy or download the transcript, or start a chat with it.

Record a meeting

1. Open Meetings and Recordings

   Select Meetings and Recordings in the sidebar.

2. Choose what you’re recording

   • Online meeting records the call and your voice together — Zoom, Teams, or anything else playing on your computer. This option needs the Bearly desktop app; on web and mobile the card offers Get desktop app instead.
   • In person or voice note records the room through the device’s microphone and works on every platform. Audio you hear in headphones isn’t included.

3. Select Start recording

   Allow microphone access if Bearly asks. On a Mac, recording computer audio also uses the system’s Screen Recording permission; if it’s missing, Bearly shows a notice with an Open Screen Recording settings button. If computer audio can’t start, the recording continues from the microphone and says so.

4. Select Stop recording when you’re done

   The transcript you watched live is saved and shown immediately. The audio uploads to your account in the background, and a more accurate final transcript replaces the live one when it’s ready — you don’t need to stay on the page.

While recording, the live transcript appears in the recording’s entry at the top of Recordings. You can work elsewhere in Bearly: with the sidebar open, a compact Recording card shows the latest transcript line, and with the sidebar closed a floating stop control stays visible. Audio is saved continuously on the device as you record.

The live transcript supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Turkish. It can follow speakers who switch between supported languages in the same conversation. After you stop, Bearly checks the complete recording and can use broader language coverage for the final transcript when needed.

A recording can run up to 1 hr 15 min. At the limit, Bearly stops the recording and keeps everything captured up to that point.

Caution

Only record people with their permission. Recording laws vary by place; you are responsible for getting consent.

Work with a recording

Select a recording in the Recordings list. Bearly proposes a title from the first minutes of the conversation; edit the title any time, and a title you type is never replaced.

• Speakers — when more than one voice is identified, a form lists each detected speaker. Type a name once and it applies to the live view, the saved transcript, and exports. A single-voice recording reads as a voice memo, without speaker labels.
• Improve speaker labels — reviews the full recording again to tell voices apart more accurately. Names you already typed carry over to the improved labels.
• Create summary — writes a quick summary with key points, decisions, action items, and open questions, and saves it with the recording. Refresh rewrites it; Copy puts it on the clipboard.
• Chat with transcript — opens a new chat with the transcript attached as a file, ready in the composer. Nothing is sent, and nothing is spent, until you send a message.
• Copy — opens Copy transcript, where you choose Text only, Speaker names, or Names and timestamps (for a voice memo, Text only or Timestamps), then copy the result or select Download .txt.
• The audio player plays the original recording, and you can download the audio file.

Completed recordings and transcripts are saved to your account, so they’re available when you sign in on another device.

To remove a recording, select the Delete recording trash button. Bearly permanently deletes the audio, transcript, speaker names, and summary; this cannot be undone.

Caution

Names, numbers, accents, and overlapping voices can be transcribed incorrectly. Check important passages against the audio before relying on exact wording.

If something interrupts a recording

Recordings are built to survive trouble:

• If the connection drops or your usage limit is reached mid-meeting, the live transcript pauses and the audio keeps recording. The recording says Live transcript paused at the account limit. Audio recording continues. when a limit is the cause.
• If the final transcript fails, the recording is marked Needs attention; select Retry to run it again. The audio stays saved either way.
• If an upload can’t finish, the recording stays on the device that made it, marked Saved on device, with Retry upload and Discard in its detail pane. Discard permanently removes the local audio and transcript.
• If microphone access is denied on desktop, the error includes an Open microphone settings button that takes you to the right system pane.

On the desktop app, an in-progress recording keeps going while you navigate around Bearly, and the app finishes saving before it quits. In a browser, keep the recording tab open: audio already saved survives a refresh, but the live capture stops.

For team administrators

Managed-team administrators can turn Meetings off from Teams → team name → Policies → policy name → Collaboration → Disable Meetings.

Already have a recording as a file? Transcribe audio and video turns uploaded audio and video into transcripts in a chat.