How to turn a lecture recording into notes

Check whether a transcript already exists

If your university records lectures, look on the course page before doing anything else. Many lecture capture systems add captions or a transcript automatically, and if so, the first part is already done.

If you are recording your own, make sure you are allowed to first. Our guide to recording lectures covers the rules and how to ask.

How to transcribe a lecture recording

If there is no transcript, you do not need to type one yourself. These are the usual ways to get one:

• Your phone. Some phones now transcribe voice recordings in their built-in recorder app. Check yours before installing anything.
• Your university account. Some Microsoft 365 plans can transcribe an uploaded audio file in Word on the web, so it is worth checking what your student account includes.
• A transcription app. There are plenty, usually with a limit on free minutes.

Whichever you use, clear audio makes the biggest difference. A recording made from the front of the room comes out far better than one made from the back.

Fix the transcript before you rely on it

Transcription gets technical words, names and numbers wrong, and those are often the parts that matter in an exam. A biology term can come out as an ordinary word that sounds alike, and the sentence will still look fine.

You do not need to correct all of it. Skim for anything that looks odd, and check key terms, names, dates and figures against the slides or the textbook.

Turn the transcript into notes

A transcript has every aside and repeated sentence in it, and no structure. Reading it back is nearly as slow as listening. Work through it once and pull out what you would want on a page:

1. Find the structure. Use the lecture slides or the course outline to mark where each topic starts, and make those your headings.
2. Under each heading, write the main idea in your own words. Rewording it is what makes you think about it.
3. Add the definitions, formulas and one example for each idea, and leave out the rest.
4. Mark anything you still do not understand, so you can ask or look it up rather than copy it down.
5. Finish with two or three sentences on what the lecture was about. If you cannot write them, go back to that part.

A one-hour lecture should come down to a page or two. If your notes are nearly as long as the transcript, you are copying rather than choosing.

If you use AI to write the notes

An AI tool can do the first draft of this in seconds, and that is a fair use of it. Two things still matter. Check the draft against the slides, because AI can state something wrong with complete confidence. And read it properly, because notes you have only saved are not notes you have learned.

Do it the same day

It is much easier to make notes while the lecture is still fresh, since you remember what the lecturer stressed and what the examples were for. Recordings left for the end of semester tend to stay unopened, and a full week of them is a lot of audio to get through.

Once the notes are done, test yourself on them within a day or two rather than only re-reading them. That is where the remembering happens.

How Grasp does it

Grasp skips the transcript stage. Press record and it writes your notes while the lecture is still going, and when you stop, they are saved into that subject, ready to edit. The audio is not kept.

It works from a live recording, not from an audio file you already have, so for older recordings use the steps above. From there you can highlight any line to have it explained, and Grasp can write a quiz from your notes.