Live Captions / Transcribe a lecture or meeting to text on Windows
How to transcribe a lecture or meeting to text on Windows
Updated October 28, 2026
To transcribe an online lecture, webinar or meeting to text on Windows, install Live Captions & Transcribe, set the audio source to computer sound and press Start: it captions whatever the PC plays and keeps a searchable history you can rename, copy, or export to TXT or SRT. For Teams meetings specifically, Teams can also generate its own transcript, and Otter.ai is a well-known option if you want AI-written summaries.
"Transcribe a meeting" can mean several different things depending on what you actually need afterward: a rough text you can search for one detail, a clean transcript to send to someone who missed it, or an AI summary with action items. This guide focuses on getting a usable live transcript from a Windows PC, and is honest about where a dedicated app helps and where a built-in tool is already enough.
Your options for a text transcript on Windows
| Option | Works for | Search / export | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live Captions & Transcribe | Any sound the PC plays: lectures, webinars, calls in any app | Searchable history, rename speakers, TXT/SRT export | Free to try, then minute packs or a subscription |
| Microsoft Teams transcription | Teams meetings only, if enabled for your account | Transcript saved with the meeting; search depends on plan | Included with eligible Teams/Microsoft 365 plans |
| Otter.ai | Meetings it joins or audio you upload | Search, summaries, export (plan-dependent) | Free tier with limits, paid plans for more minutes |
| Word dictation / Windows voice typing | Your own speech into a document | Plain text in the document you dictate into | Free, built in |
Transcribing an online lecture or webinar
Online lectures and webinars are usually a single speaker for a long stretch, often with slides and sometimes an accent or technical vocabulary that is easy to mishear live and hard to remember afterward. A system-wide captioning app captures this cleanly because it listens to the PC's sound, not to one particular video platform:
- Install Live Captions & Transcribe from the Microsoft Store. No account or card is needed to try it.
- Join the lecture or webinar in whichever app or browser tab it runs in — Zoom, a university portal, YouTube Live, or anything else.
- Set the audio source to computer sound so the app captions the lecturer's voice as it plays.
- Press Start before the lecture begins, or as soon as you join, so nothing is missed.
- Let it run in the background. The caption window stays on top, so you can still see slides or take your own notes underneath.
- Open the history afterward to search the transcript, copy sections into your notes, or export the whole thing to TXT.
The language is detected automatically from 60 speech languages, which helps with lectures given by non-native speakers or in a second language, and text size up to 64 pt makes a transcript easier to proofread on screen right after the session.
Transcribing a meeting
Meetings add a wrinkle lectures don't have: multiple speakers, often talking over each other, where knowing who said what matters as much as what was said.
- Join the meeting as usual in Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or any other app.
- In Live Captions & Transcribe, choose computer sound and press Start.
- Each speaker gets their own color and a new line, which helps even if the app can't tell you their name automatically.
- After the meeting, open the session in the history, rename "Speaker 1" and "Speaker 2" to the real names, and copy or export the cleaned-up transcript.
Good to know. The app needs an internet connection. While captions are running, the audio is sent to a cloud speech recognition service to turn it into text; it is not recorded, and the transcript is saved only on your PC. It transcribes in the spoken language and does not translate; for that, the sister app Live Subtitles shows the original and a translation together.
How this compares to Otter, Teams transcription and dictation
Otter.ai is built around meeting transcripts with AI summaries, action items, and often joins a call as a bot or connects through your calendar. If you want an automatic summary rather than a raw transcript, Otter or a similar meeting-AI tool is a better fit than a captioning app, which does not generate summaries. The trade-off is that a bot joining the call is visible to other participants, and Otter's free tier has monthly minute limits.
Microsoft Teams transcription is a solid free option if every meeting you need happens inside Teams and your organization's license and admin settings allow it. It falls short the moment a lecture is on Zoom, a webinar is on YouTube, or you want one consistent transcript history across several apps instead of a separate one saved inside each meeting.
Word dictation or Windows voice typing transcribes your own speech as you talk into a document — useful for dictating notes to yourself, but not built for capturing someone else's voice from a call or a video, and it does not run in the background while you do something else.
If you only ever attend meetings in one of these apps and already get a transcript from it, there may be no need to add another tool. A system-wide captioning app earns its place when your lectures and meetings are spread across different apps, or when you want one place to search everything afterward.
A note on privacy and consent
Transcribing a lecture you are attending as a student is usually fine for personal study notes, but transcribing a meeting that includes other people is different: many workplaces, schools and jurisdictions expect you to tell participants, or get consent, before recording or transcribing what they say, and some places have specific legal requirements around this. Check your organization's policy and local rules before you transcribe a call that is not entirely your own.
Try Live Captions & Transcribe free on Windows 10 or 11. No account, no card.
Get it from Microsoft Store