My first gig fresh out of university was listening to recordings and transcribing them (putting my history degree to good use, I know).
With recent advancements in AI and call recording technology, what took me hours every Monday now takes seconds.
With AI-generated transcriptions, you can review calls to locate that critical tidbit of information you need immediately after a call ends. These documents also help you improve service, coach your customer service and sales representatives, and save your team a ton of time.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to transcribe phone calls on iPhone and Android, and with seven call transcription software if using your phone isn’t a good fit. And if you’re a growing business that needs to keep everyone on the same page and follow up faster, we’ll also show you a better option built for teams.
How to transcribe phone calls on an iPhone
Here’s how to transcribe audio files on your iPhone:
- Open the Notes app on your iPhone.
- Go to the Call Recordings folder and select a note with a recorded call.
- Tap Transcript to view the transcription.
From there, you can play back specific parts of the audio, search the text, copy or save the transcript, or delete the recording and transcript entirely.
Seems straightforward enough. Just remember that transcribing calls directly on your phone isn’t a sustainable solution for businesses. It’s disorganized and makes it hard to share information or keep track of conversations, especially when transcripts and recordings live in separate apps with no connection to customer profiles.
⚠️ Note: Call transcription is only available starting from iOS 18.1 and in select languages and regions, including English (US and Australia), Spanish (US), Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean.
How to transcribe phone calls on an Android
Unlike iPhones, Android phones don’t have a built-in text transcription feature. You’ll need to install a dedicated app, like Rogervoice Phone Subtitles. Here’s how:
- Download Rogervoice Phone Subtitles on Google Play.
- Open the app, enter your phone number, and follow the instructions in-app to get set up.
- Select the number you want to dial from the Contacts tab or dial it from the Dialpad.
- Your transcript will appear on the page while you speak.
Just keep in mind that if you want your transcripts to be saved on your phone, you’ll need to upgrade to paid plans.
Methods like this might work for occasional or personal use. But things can quickly get chaotic and time-consuming if you’re transcribing calls for a growing business. It’s hard to search past conversations, share key details with your team, or keep track of who said what — especially when everything lives in separate places.
⚠️Note: In your research, you might’ve come across Google’s Live Transcript tool as a way to transcribe calls into written text on Android. Keep in mind that this app doesn’t work for live calls unless you take calls on a separate device and put it on speakerphone.
3 signs your business has outgrown DIY call transcription
When you first start a business, it may make sense to use your phone to record calls or upload your audio files to a third-party transcription service. But it’s not sustainable in the long run, especially as your customer-facing team scales. As your business grows and your call volume increases, uploading calls can easily take hours of unnecessary work each week. Not to mention, it’s prone to error.
Consider the following scenarios. If any of these apply to your current situation, you know it’s time to upgrade to a service like Quo, with built-in call transcription software:
Scenario 1: You’re not the only one answering the phone
When it’s just you running the show, reviewing call recordings or quick transcriptions from your phone might work fine. But once you’ve got a team, whether it’s two people or 10, things can get messy fast.
You need everyone to have access to past conversations so customers don’t have to repeat themselves. If someone’s out sick or busy on another call, someone else should be able to step in and follow up without missing a beat, not waste time tracking down information that should be easy to find.
That’s tough to do if you’re not using shared numbers and transcripts are stuck on a personal device, buried in a separate app, or not tied to the customer’s full conversation history.
Scenario 2: You need call transcriptions in context
A call transcription does you little good if it’s stored separately in a file on your supervisor’s desktop and you and your teammates don’t have access to it.
If you’re working as a team, you need all relevant communication information — customer details, transcripts, texts, voice messages, etc. — in one place where everyone has equal access with the click of a button.
An open-access transcript also gives you and everyone on your team full context to review calls if something was miscommunicated on a previous call. This helps bring you up to speed on previous customer interactions, improving the customer experience. Plus, it helps to have a clear communication trail in case a legal dispute arises.
Scenario 3: You want an easier way to follow up after a call
Let’s say one of your customers needs an urgent follow-up, but your colleague who was working with the customer has already left for the day.
With no shared access to the call transcript or summary, the rest of the team is flying blind. No one knows what was said, what was promised, or what needs to happen next. So the customer either gets radio silence or has to repeat themselves tomorrow.
With a business phone platform that transcribes calls and stores everything in one place, anyone on your team can step in, see what happened, and follow up immediately — without digging through someone else’s voicemails or asking around.
If you’re using Quo, you also have access to internal threads, which let you communicate internally behind the scenes to solve problems and assign follow-up tasks to other team members.
Built-in transcripts and summaries: What your current setup is missing
A phone system with transcription built in saves you from juggling extra apps or adding more steps to your workflow.
For example, Quo comes with integrated, automatic AI transcriptions of any recorded call (available on the Business and Scale plans). Instead of using your phone to manually record and transcribe business calls, Quo transcribes them for you, including timestamps and speakers, within seconds of the call ending.
You also get automatic summaries of each call and potential action items so you can save time on after call work and get up to speed more quickly.
Call summaries, recordings, and transcripts are automatically saved in the respective conversation thread, so everything’s in one place. If you have any feedback or questions, you can tag team members in threads.
With AI call tags, you can organize and find important calls, review key moments, and identify those that require attention or additional coaching — such as scheduling, escalations, or problems. It’s a great way to prioritize conversations and identify higher-level trends without feeling overwhelmed.
You can access AI call tags on our Scale plan.
How to transcribe phone calls with Quo in 3 easy steps
Transcribing phone calls with Quo is simple and efficient. Follow these steps to access automatic call transcripts and summaries.
- Activate automatic call recording from your number’s settings (or press the record button ⏺️ on your call menu to start recording a specific phone call).
- Within seconds of a call ending, an AI-generated transcript and summary will appear in the conversation thread.
- Click View transcript on the top right side of the summary to access the transcription.
You can access call transcripts and summaries on Quo’s web, desktop, Android, and iOS apps.
And if missed calls are an ongoing issue, you can use Sona, Quo’s AI voice agent as a fallback option to take calls during or after business hours.
7 standalone transcription software tools
While a phone system with transcription built in is usually the simplest option, you might consider using a separate transcription tool if you already have call recordings saved elsewhere or just need to transcribe a few one-off calls. Here are some top picks:
1. Otter.ai
Pricing: Free up to 300 monthly transcription minutes, 30 minutes per conversation, then $8.33 per month (billed annually).
Use case: Automated voice meeting notes and real-time transcription.
Otter.ai uses artificial intelligence to transcribe your calls. On top of automatically transcribing recorded and live calls, Otter.ai uses speech recognition technology to identify who’s speaking and when. Once your transcription is complete, you and your team members can add annotations to highlight takeaways and assign tasks to employees.
Otter also offers AI Chat, which lets you ask questions about previous recordings and generates insights into conversations.
2. Fireflies.AI
Pricing: Free (limited) transcripts and 2-hour recording limits, then $10 per user per month (billed annually).
Use case: Automated video meeting notes and real-time transcription.
Like Otter, Fireflies.ai uses AI to transcribe your calls. It can join your video meetings (like on Zoom and Google Meet), prepare transcripts, and take notes. You can also upload separate audio files.
Fireflies supports meetings in English. For Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and “100+ other languages” support is available in beta. The Enterprise plan (starting at $39 per user per month billed annually) is also HIPAA compliant, which makes the tool suited for healthcare professionals.
3. Gong.io
Pricing: Must contact sales for a quote.
Use case: Sales call transcription and conversation analysis.
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that automatically records and transcribes sales calls, providing detailed insights into each conversation. It integrates with web conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to capture calls and generate transcripts. Then, it automatically updates your CRM with the activity data.
Gong’s AI analyzes these transcripts to identify key topics, track talk ratios (like how much a rep talks vs. listens or how many questions they ask), and surface actionable insights. While the pricing is not available, Reddit users note that it’s on the higher end of the pricing range.
4. HappyScribe
Pricing: Starts with a pay-as-you-go model at 50 cents per minute. After that, it’s $6 per month (billed annually).
Use case: Automated and human-made transcription and subtitles.
HappyScribe is an audio transcription and video subtitling platform that uses AI to automatically transcribe your calls and can translate them into over 65 languages. It also makes editing your transcripts easy by providing an interactive editor for correcting errors.
You can also have human experts review AI-generated transcripts to ensure complete accuracy. Plus, HappyScribe’s AI can help you take care of tasks like summarizing transcripts and repurposing them into blogs.
5. SpeechText.AI
Pricing: Starts at $10 for 180 transcription minutes.
Use case: Industry-specific transcription for professionals and researchers.
SpeechText.AI is a call transcription tool that offers domain-specific speech recognition technology. This means it takes into account your specific industry or audio type — for example, conference call, sales call, or podcast — when creating your transcriptions, so you get more accurate results. SpeechText.AI also supports over 30 languages and accents.
You can use SpeechText.AI for $10 per month, but you’ll need to upgrade to access its signature domain-specific services ($19 for their personal plan and $49 for their standard plan).
6. Rev
Pricing: 45 minutes of AI transcriptions per month for free. After that, plans begin at $9.99 per user per month.
Use case: Automated and human-made audio and video transcription, captions, and subtitles.
Rev is an audio transcription service that offers human and automated AI transcriptions for law professionals in particular. It guarantees 99% accuracy for call transcriptions delivered by humans, which cost $1.99 per minute of audio.
To generate a transcript with Rev, you can upload a file, record a meeting, or use a mobile recording.
7. Trint
Pricing: Starts at $52 per user per month (billed annually).
Use case: Newsrooms, publications, and content creators needing audio and video transcriptions.
Trint is a video and audio transcription tool used primarily by media companies, but it’s also suitable for law firms and financial services.
Once your call transcription is complete, you and your team members can highlight, mark up, and comment on the text. Trint also offers live transcription and claims to “automatically detect 30+ languages to capture events as they happen.”
Record and transcribe phone calls with Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Phone transcripts improve team training and follow-ups, support legal compliance, and give you a searchable, shareable log of what was said.
Instead of replaying full recordings, taking call notes, or relying on memory, you can quickly find and act on the info that matters. And with transcription software, you don’t have to do it manually. Tools like Quo generate transcripts and call summaries within seconds after a call ends.
Plus, you can call and text the US and Canada for free from Quo’s modern business phone system. And catching up on conversations is easy with all call recordings, texts, and voice messages in a single thread for each contact.
Start your free trial of Quo to begin exploring this feature and more.
FAQs
Call transcription is a speech-to-text record of a phone conversation that gives you a written record of your phone calls. Businesses use transcripts to review conversations, share information with team members, track follow-ups, and keep a reliable record for training or legal purposes.
Here’s how phone call transcription helps your business:
– Train new team members faster: Share real customer calls so employees can learn how to respond and what good conversations sound like.
– Keep everyone on the same page: Transcripts give your team quick access to past conversations so no one has to ask the customer to repeat themselves.
– Find key info without re-listening: Transcripts are searchable, which makes it easier to locate details like dates, names, or follow-up tasks.
– Create a reliable communication trail: In case of a dispute or misunderstanding, transcripts give you clear documentation of what was actually said.
– Capture and use customer feedback: Whether it’s praise or a complaint, transcripts help you track patterns and provide insights to improve your business.
– Personalize future conversations: Reviewing past transcripts before a call helps you recall key details and build stronger rapport with customers.
Google Voice doesn’t transcribe phone calls, only voicemail. Business users who use Google Voice for Google Workspace need to record their phone calls and upload the audio file to a third-party transcription tool.
The legality of call transcriptions can vary depending on where you live. Canada and some US states require explicit agreement from all parties before you can record calls. It’s best to consult your local laws before setting up call transcriptions and let your callers know you’re recording, even if you’re not legally obligated to.
Yes. Quo is a business phone app with built-in call recording and transcription, so you don’t have to manually switch between tools or upload files.
Without AI transcription built into your call recording software, you would have to use a call recording software and a separate call transcription solution. This more complicated process would require you to go between your call recording and transcription solutions, and the four-step process would generally look like this:
1. Record the phone call using your call recording software.
2. Download the file to your desktop and upload it to your transcription service or app.
3. Once the transcription has finished generating, check to make sure it’s correct.
4. Store the call in your files and share it with your team.
If you’re looking to transcribe recordings from elsewhere, standalone tools like Otter.ai or Fireflies can help.
You can transcribe calls in a couple of ways. One way is to manually record the calls using a dedicated call recording app or device and then upload the audio files to a third-party transcription service that will provide you with a written transcript. Alternatively, you can use automated transcription services like Quo that leverage AI technology to transcribe calls right after they end.
