How to transcribe and summarize an online class to study later

Taking notes in class is a dilemma: if you write everything down, you miss the explanation; if you only listen, on exam week your notebook has three loose sentences and a doodle. Online classes make it worse — the lecturer shares their screen, talks fast, and you’re switching between listening and typing.

You can fix this by leaving the transcription to a tool and using the class to actually understand the material.

How to do it

If the class is on Google Meet or Teams (most universities use one of the two), the process is straightforward:

1. Turn on live captions in the class — in Meet it’s the “CC” button, in Teams it’s in the accessibility menu.
2. With the Transcriba extension installed in Chrome, it builds the transcript of the whole class — without joining the call.
3. At the end, you have the full text and a bulleted summary — you can turn it into a revision outline and mark what the lecturer flagged as important.

What you can do with the transcript

• Bulleted summary — the 2-hour class becomes 5 minutes of reading with the main points.
• Guided revision — ask the transcript “what did the lecturer say about X?” instead of rewatching the whole recording.
• Study group material — one shareable summary instead of everyone with a different set of notes.
• Thesis advising — a record of what the advisor asked for, without relying on your memory two days later.

Limitations

Automatic transcription gets technical terms and proper nouns wrong — for an anatomy or law class, expect to fix a few terms. It also only works in desktop Chrome, with Meet or Teams — a class recorded as a loose video or on another platform won’t work.

Test it before your next class

Installing the extension is free, and the free plan covers 10 classes a month — enough to see whether the summary helps you study before you subscribe.