With clear audio, modern AI transcription is accurate enough to study from without re-listening — including most course terminology, because the underlying models are trained on enormous amounts of academic language.
Accuracy drops in predictable situations: the microphone is far from the speaker, several people talk over each other, or the lecture leans heavily on spoken math ("x sub n plus one") that has no clean text form. Sitting closer to the front, or recording near the speaker, fixes most of it. And because every line of the transcript is timestamped, checking a suspicious term against the original audio takes seconds — you're never guessing what was actually said.
A 90-minute lecture contains roughly 10,000 spoken words, and the three sentences you need before the exam are buried somewhere inside them. A transcript makes the lecture searchable: type the term, jump to the timestamp, and re-read exactly how your professor explained it — including the example they used that never made it into the slides.
In Scholarly the transcript is also a source, not just a text file. AI Meeting Notes answers questions using the lecture itself and cites the passage it pulled from, so "what did she say about boundary conditions?" gets answered from your actual class, not from the internet's general idea of the topic.
Transcription is the verbatim record — every sentence, in order, with timestamps. Notes are the condensed, reorganized version: headings, definitions, examples, and takeaways. You want both: the notes for review, the transcript for verification and search when a detail matters. Scholarly produces both from one recording, so you never have to choose between them or run the audio through two separate tools.
For the end-to-end routine, see our guide on how to turn lecture recordings into study notes — it covers turning a raw transcript into clean notes, flashcards, and a practice exam.
Yes. Upload the video file directly and Scholarly transcribes its audio track. If the lecture is on YouTube, you don't even need to download it — paste the link into YouTube to Notes and Scholarly pulls the transcript and builds structured notes from it.
