Where it fails
- Technical vocabulary it hasn't seen. Your module's specific jargon, unusual drug names, an author's surname. Exactly the words carrying the most information.
- Accents and fast speech. A serious equity issue, and one that affects real lectures constantly.
- Bad rooms. Distance from the microphone, echo, air conditioning, thirty people rustling.
- The board. The lecturer turns away and says the important sentence over their shoulder, to a wall.
- Anything visual. A transcript cannot capture the diagram, and the diagram was frequently the entire point of the slide.
Which is why timestamps matter more than accuracy
No transcript is perfect, so the useful question is not "is it right" but "can I check it". A note anchored to a timestamp lets you jump straight back to the audio and hear what was actually said. A note with no timestamp asks you to trust a transcript you cannot verify — and a mis-transcribed technical term will otherwise be silently memorised.
This is why our lecture notes carry timestamps, and why an answer drawn from a recording cites the minute rather than the file.
How to give it a fighting chance
- Put the phone closer. The single biggest lever, and it costs nothing.
- Upload the slides too. With the deck in the same space, the technical vocabulary is available in writing — which fixes a large fraction of the transcription errors that matter.
- Check anything surprising. If a note says something that contradicts your slides, the transcript is the more likely culprit.
- Don't skip the lecture because you're recording it. Recording is a safety net for attention, not a replacement for it — see how to take lecture notes.