Transcribing a Zoom meeting is simple and a matter of following a few steps. The way described here even works on free accounts.

1.) Record the Zoom meeting
2.) Find the recording
3.) Upload the recording for transcription

Let's dive into how this works in detail.

How to record the meeting

To record a Zoom meeting just press the Record ⏺ button at the bottom of your Zoom meeting window. You can then choose to either record locally or record in the cloud. Bear in mind that all participants will be notified that they are being recorded, so as to request their consent.

Zoom shows a little popup to highlight that the recording will be converted to mp4 once the meeting is over.

How to retrieve the recording of the meeting

Your local recording is stored on your computer's hard disk. By default this is in your Documents folder, in a file named zoom.

Depending on whether you are on a Mac, Windows or Linux machine the recording lives in a different place:

Mac: /Users/[your username]/Documents/Zoom
Windows: C:\Users\[your username]\Documents\Zoom
Linux: home/[your username]/Documents/Zoom

You can also find the recording by going to the Meetings 🎥 tab in your Zoom desktop client. Check the Recorded tab. Your recorded meeting should show up here. If it's a local recording it shows the path to the file on your computer. If you only see the Open option, it means that the recording was stored on the Zoom server.

How to transcribe the Zoom recording

Zoom will have placed an audio and a video file for the same recording in the /Zoom folder. For transcription you just need the audio file. It will be smaller and faster to upload.

Take the audio file and upload it to Transcription Tom to turn it into a transcript.

If, for some reason this does not work, make sure you are running the latest version of Zoom and check out their help section

Let me know if you run into any issues transcribing your Zoom recording.