How to record lectures and meetings on your phone

A good transcript starts with a good recording. Most of the difference comes from where the phone sits and whether anything interrupts it. Five minutes of preparation will do more than anything you can fix later.

Before you start

• Check your storage. MemoLog records 16 kHz mono WAV, which is about 1.9 MB a minute. An hour takes about 115 MB, and a three-hour seminar about 350 MB.
• Charge the phone. Recording itself is not the demanding part, but transcribing afterwards is.
• Turn on airplane mode. A phone call can interrupt a recording, and MemoLog needs no connection to record or transcribe. Airplane mode solves both.
• Make a test. Record 20 seconds from the spot you plan to use, then play it back. It is the one check that catches everything.

Where to put the phone

In a lecture

• Sit in the front rows, as close to the speaker or a room loudspeaker as you can. Distance is the biggest cause of bad transcripts.
• Put the phone on the desk, not in a pocket or a bag. Leave the microphone uncovered. On most phones it is at the bottom edge.
• Stay away from your own laptop keyboard, and from anyone else's.
• Ask if you may place the phone on the lectern. Many lecturers will say yes.

In a meeting

• Put the phone in the middle of the table, closest to whoever talks most.
• Set it on a folded cloth or a notebook, which reduces thumps from the table.
• Ask people to speak one at a time. Overlapping voices are hard for any transcription.
• For a call on speakerphone, keep the phone with MemoLog close to the speaker, and test the level first.

While it records

Tap the big button and watch the level meter for a moment. If it barely moves when someone speaks, the phone is too far away.

• The screen can go off. Recording keeps going, and Android shows a notification so you know it is on.
• Pause during breaks. You save space and avoid a long stretch of chatter or silence. Long silences are also where speech models tend to invent text.
• Say the topic out loud at the start. "Thermodynamics, week four." It costs you three seconds, and it gives you a word to search for.
• Note the time of the important parts. When something matters, glance at the timer and write it down.

If something goes wrong, such as an empty battery or the app being stopped, MemoLog writes the audio as it goes. It repairs the recording the next time you open the app, up to the last second it saved.

Afterwards

1. Rename it straight away. You will not remember which recording "Nov 6, 14:02" was.
2. Let it transcribe. New recordings start by themselves unless you turn that off in Settings. A long one takes a while, and the time depends on your phone. Keep the app open and the phone on a charger, because Android can stop work in the background.
3. If the talk is in one language, set it first. Choosing the language in Settings is more reliable than leaving it to detection.
4. Review while you listen. Play at up to 2× and let the text follow. Tap any sentence to jump there.
5. Search later. Search covers titles and transcripts across all your recordings.

What to expect from the text

• Technical terms will suffer. The small model on your phone does not know your field. Formulas, drug names and foreign names may come out wrong, so treat the text as an index into the audio, not as a replacement for it.
• Speakers are not labelled. A meeting comes out as one run of text. If you need to know who said what, note it during the meeting or listen back.
• It is not minutes. You get what was said, not a summary or a list of decisions.

Free or Pro?

Recording is free and unlimited, and so is sharing the audio. The free version transcribes the first 5 minutes of each recording, which is enough to test your setup but not enough for a full lecture. MemoLog Pro is a single purchase that transcribes any length, exports the text or SRT subtitles, and lets you import audio from another recorder. If you record first and buy later, you can transcribe the rest of your earlier recordings too.