Lecture transcription that survives your subject's vocabulary
Most speech recognition was not built for a lecturer saying myocardial infarction at speed in a room with bad acoustics. eNotee primes the transcriber with your subject's vocabulary before it starts, records through a locked screen, and keeps the resulting transcript indefinitely on every plan — including free.
What you can feed it
- Live recording in the iOS and Android apps
- Uploaded audio files — voice memos, exported call recordings, MP3, M4A
- Single recordings up to 90 minutes free, 3 hours on Student, uncapped on Scholar
How it works
- 01
Tell it what you study
Your subject determines which vocabulary gets primed. This happens once during onboarding and changes the transcript quality more than anything else you can control.
- 02
Record, or upload
Recording continues with the screen locked and while you use other apps. On iOS the Lock Screen shows a running timer with pause and resume.
- 03
Read, search, and quote it
The transcript is text, so it is searchable. Finding the definition your lecturer gave in week three takes a search rather than scrubbing through ninety minutes of audio.
What comes back
Exactly what you get
- A full searchable transcript
- The whole class as text, kept indefinitely on every plan including free.
- A summary built on top of it
- An overview plus up to 12 key insights drawn from across the whole recording.
- Study material from the same transcript
- Flashcards and exam-style questions, generated from what was said rather than from the subject generally.
Under the hood
How it actually handles this
Subject vocabulary is fed to the recogniser in advance
Each subject carries a curated list of the terms generic speech recognition most often gets wrong — proper nouns, Latin and Greek roots, domain jargon. Medicine primes terms like anastomosis, ischemia and pathophysiology; Law primes appellant, pleadings and cause of action. The lists are kept deliberately short, because a long list dilutes the bias and stops helping.
Two providers, one as a fallback
Transcription runs on a fast primary provider with a second, different engine behind it. If the first fails or returns something unusable, the job goes to the other rather than failing back to you. You do not choose or see this; it just means one provider having a bad day is not your problem.
The transcript outlives the audio
Playback of the original recording is time-limited by plan — 30 days free, 240 on Student, 730 on Scholar — but the transcript, summary and flashcards are kept indefinitely on every tier. Nothing is deleted when a playback window closes, and upgrading makes an old recording playable again.
What it doesn’t do
Worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.
- No speaker separation. A seminar with several people talking over each other comes back as a single stream of text.
- Recording is in the mobile apps. The web app takes uploads only.
- Accuracy depends on the microphone. A phone at the back of a lecture hall with a quiet speaker is the hardest case there is, and no amount of processing recovers what was never captured.
- Only the subjects with curated vocabulary lists get that priming benefit — a very niche field falls back to general recognition.
- There is no live, on-screen captioning while the lecture is happening; transcription runs after the recording finishes.
Questions
- How accurate is it?
- It depends far more on your recording conditions than on anything else. The specific thing eNotee does to help is priming the recogniser with your subject's vocabulary, which is where generic transcription most visibly fails on technical lectures.
- Does it separate speakers?
- No. The transcript is one stream. For a lecture this is rarely a problem; for a discussion-heavy seminar it is a real limitation.
- Can I keep the transcript forever?
- Yes, on every plan including free. Only playback of the original audio file has a time limit, and it becomes playable again if you upgrade.
- Can I record from my laptop?
- Not in the browser. Record in the iOS or Android app, or record however you like and upload the file to the web app.
Also worth a look
Try it on one thing tonight.
Try any plan free for 14 days, no card. Starter then includes 300 minutes of transcription a month, single recordings up to 90 minutes, and transcripts kept indefinitely.
14-day free trial · no card needed.