Zoom transcription whoever hosts the call and whatever the plan

Zoom transcription is turning what is said on a Zoom call into text. Zoom does it itself on the accounts listed in its help: a transcript of a cloud recording, a meeting summary that the host or a co-host starts, and personal notes with a transcript. Dalm, a Mac app for dictation and meeting notes, works on any Zoom plan and without host rights: it records your microphone and the sound Zoom plays on your Mac, and nothing joins the call. Speech is recognised on your Mac and no audio is sent anywhere; the transcript is synced to our servers automatically, and a language model writes the summary from that text. There is a Free plan.

What Zoom itself turns into text, and what each way needs

Way	What it takes	Who starts it
A transcript of a cloud recording	A Pro, Business, Education or Enterprise Zoom account, with cloud recording and audio transcription turned on	Whoever records the meeting to the cloud
Meeting summary with AI	A licensed user on a paid Zoom Workplace plan, with the feature turned on	Only the host or a co-host; participants get it if the host shares it
My Notes	A Pro, Business or Enterprise account, or a My Notes account, with access to the microphone and system audio	You; your notes are not shared with the host or participants automatically
Dalm, on your own Mac	A Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and a Dalm account; any Zoom plan	You; nothing joins the call, so telling the others is up to you

If you host on a paid Zoom plan and the text only needs to stay in your Zoom account, Zoom’s own options may be all you need. My Notes is the closest to what Dalm does: it is yours, and you start it, not the host. Dalm is for the other cases: you are a guest in someone else’s call, your Zoom plan is not one of those listed above, or Zoom is one of several places you talk and the text should not depend on one account. Who may record a Zoom meeting, and what becomes of the captions shown during a call, is set out in the guide to recording a Zoom meeting. How Zoom’s own AI features compare with Dalm, on other platforms and in the room as well, is set out line by line.

Transcribing a Zoom call from your own Mac

When Zoom starts using the microphone, Dalm offers to record with a notification — “Record this meeting?”, with a Record button. It comes at most once every ten minutes for the same app, and “Offer to record when a call starts” in settings turns it off; ⌃⌥M or the Meeting button in the menu bar starts a recording at any time. The app then takes two streams: your microphone, and the sound of the other apps, Zoom included, which is where the other people’s voices are. Nothing is added to the meeting. If the call is running but the recording gets silence from the other side, the screen says “the other side is not heard” while you can still fix it. How this compares with a bot or with Zoom’s own Record button is on the page comparing meeting recorders.

Where the sound and the text of the call go

Speech is recognised on your Mac, and the voices are told apart there too. No audio is sent anywhere, to us or to a language model. The text goes the other way: the transcript, line by line with its times and voice numbers, is synced to our servers automatically, and no setting turns the sync off. A language model then reads that text to write the summary. The audio is deleted once the text exists. How Zoom’s own features handle the sound of a call is set out in Zoom’s documentation; this page does not describe it. What goes where, piece by piece, is on privacy.

Zoom meeting notes: transcript, summary and quotes

When you stop, the call becomes a transcript: every line with its time and a voice. If a calendar event is running when the offer to record appears, the meeting takes the event’s title; otherwise the model names it from what was said. Your own lines are yours from the start, because they come from your microphone; the other voices are told apart from the call’s sound. Naming them is optional, and the summary does not wait: until you answer, a voice shows the app’s guess or a number, and in the naming step a guess may be marked “Suggested by Dalm — check before you agree.” In the transcript and the summary a guess looks like any other name until you confirm or change it. The notes you type during the call are what the summary is built around.

In the meeting summary, each point keeps a word-for-word quote. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. A Zoom call with a client sits there next to a call on another platform and the talk you had in the room afterwards.

A Zoom recording you already have

If the meeting was recorded in Zoom and you have the file, bring it in instead: the file is read on your Mac, and its transcript is synced to our servers like any other. Where Zoom puts a recording made on your computer is in the guide to recording a Zoom meeting, and the steps for any file are in the guide to transcribing an audio file.

What Dalm does not do on a Zoom call

• It records sound, not the screen. What was typed in the chat, shown on a shared screen or seen on video is not in the transcript.
• It does not tell the other people. It is not in the call, so say at the start that you are recording; the app reminds you of this before your first meeting. The rules on recording consent differ by place.
• It does not give you the transcript during the call. While it records, it can show a draft of what has been said; the transcript is made when you stop — from the call to usable text.
• It does not keep the recording. There is no player and no audio export.
• It does not count very short calls: with fewer than 100 words, a recording is not a meeting.
• It does not know a voice from one call to the next. Each meeting starts with new voices.
• It does not change your organisation’s rules. If calls there are not to be recorded, that is a rule about people, and no app is a way around it.
• It does not always offer to record a call in a browser. In Zoom in a browser, start the recording yourself with ⌃⌥M.
• It is not on Windows, and it needs an account.

Free, Pro or Team: after the first Zoom call

Recording a Zoom call, the transcript and the summary come with the Free plan, whichever Zoom plan the meeting runs on. What the paid plans add is on the pricing page. If your team talks to clients on Zoom, a shared dictionary keeps client and product names spelled the same way in every transcript — more on working as a team.