Why your transcription is wrong (and how to fix it)

People blame the app when a transcript comes back full of nonsense. Almost always, the app did the best that could be done with what it was given. Transcription quality is decided at the moment of recording, and by then it is too late to fix.

The eight things that ruin a transcript

1. Distance. The single biggest factor. Speech intelligibility drops sharply with distance, and a phone across a table is already too far. Within arm's reach is a different result entirely.
2. Background noise. Not volume itself but the type: a café is far worse than a busy road, because other speech competes directly with yours.
3. Reverberation. A hard, empty room smears each word into the next. Soft furnishings help more than people expect, which is why bedrooms transcribe better than kitchens.
4. Several people at once. Overlapping speech is the hardest case for every system. In a meeting, one person speaking at a time helps the transcript more than any setting.
5. Wind. Outdoors, wind across the microphone destroys whole sentences. A hand cupped around the phone is a surprisingly effective fix.
6. Trailing off. Ends of sentences get quieter as we lose interest in them. That is where most errors cluster.
7. Proper nouns. Names, products and jargon have no context to be inferred from. Spell out the important ones once at the start of a recording and correct them afterwards in seconds.
8. Table contact. A phone lying on a desk picks up every tap and cup, directly through its body. Propping it against something is better than laying it flat.

What actually helps, in order

• Phone within arm's reach, pointed towards you.
• A soft room rather than a hard one — curtains, sofa, carpet.
• Wired earphones with a microphone, which sit close to the mouth by design and outperform the phone in almost any noisy setting.
• Speaking slightly slower than feels natural. Not slowly — just not rushed.
• Saying punctuation out loud if you want structure: "full stop", "new paragraph".

Why a summary matters more than a perfect transcript

A transcript of a ten-minute recording is around 1,500 words of unstructured speech, complete with false starts and repetition. Almost nobody reads that back. It is technically a record and practically still an audio file — something you know contains the answer and never revisit.

This is the real reason summaries matter: not because transcription is insufficient, but because raw text is nearly as unusable as raw audio. What makes a voice note valuable is getting back a shorter thing than you put in.