Transcribe a recording made in a lecture hall echo, air handling and all.
A two- to three-hour lecture recorded in a hall is transcribed in about 4 to 6 minutes, and the lecturer's speech comes through even when the room adds echo. The first 20 minutes are free, and a three-hour lecture uses 180 of the 500 minutes in a $6 pack. Below is what a large room does to a phone or lectern recording, and which parts of the lecture come back cleanly.
What the room does
A hall is built to carry a voice to the back row. A microphone hears the walls as well.
Echo and distance
From the back row, a phone hears the lecturer and the reflection off the walls a fraction later. Clear, steady speech still transcribes well; quick asides, words said while turning to the board and formulas mumbled while writing are where gaps appear.
The lectern mic is the better source
If the lecture runs through a lectern or lapel microphone, the hall's own recording or the lecture-capture video carries a cleaner voice than any seat can. Use that file when you can get it, and keep your phone recording as the backup.
Questions from the floor
Students asking questions are usually far from any microphone, so their words may come back partial. Most lecturers repeat or answer the question in full, and that answer transcribes cleanly at its timestamp. Projector fans, chairs and air handling are not transcribed; speech is.
Pricing a whole course
Twenty-six lectures of 75 minutes are 1,950 minutes and fit the $12 pack of 2,000. A course that meets for three hours a week across fourteen weeks is 2,520 minutes and sits on the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes.
What goes wrong with hall recordings
The audio sounds fine to you. Short-clip tools still struggle with three hours of it.
✗ The usual trouble
Long lecture audio with room echo trips up tools sized for clean, short clips.
- A file too big for a 25 MB API limit
- Splitting a three-hour lecture into parts
- Timestamps that restart in every part
- Board work typed from memory
- Nothing to search before the exam
- A subscription for one term
✓ What comes back
The whole lecture as one document, with the lecturer's points in order.
- One upload for the whole lecture
- Ready in minutes, not hours
- Chapters at each topic change
- Terms, names and dates listed
- A chat you can ask about any topic covered
- DOCX for notes, SRT for the video
Sample
A lecture recorded from the middle rows.
This sample is illustrative and written for this page; it is not from a real course. Timestamps place the lines in a three-hour lecture, including a question from the floor.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $6 (500 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Lecture hall recordings, answered.
How long is the wait for a three-hour lecture?
Around 6 minutes, since an hour of audio takes about 2. A 90-minute lecture takes about 3, and the transcript is kept in your Library.
Does room echo ruin the transcript?
Usually not. The lecturer's steady speech carries through echo; fast asides, speech facing away from the room and distant questions are what come back partial. Recording nearer the front, or using the lectern mic's file, gives the cleanest result.
How much of a pack does a three-hour lecture use?
180 minutes on the $6 pack of 500 minutes. If this is your first visit, the first 20 minutes are free and the pack picks up where the preview ended. Prices are in US dollars, and unused minutes never expire.
The lecture-capture video is several gigabytes. Will it upload?
The limit for one file is 10 hours or 5 GB. Without a pack yet, uploads top out at 2 GB, and a heavier file starts once one is bought. If the lecture is on YouTube or Vimeo, paste the link instead.
Which languages work?
99 languages, detected automatically. A lecture given mainly in Spanish, Japanese or Swedish is detected on that language, and a lecture in Tagalog that switches into English is handled in one recording.
Which exports, and who sees my recording?
You can download TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training.
Related
More for lectures
Send the lecture. Read its first 20 minutes free.
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