How to record a lecture on iPhone and turn it into notes

Put the phone on the desk facing the lecturer rather than in your pocket, record in something that will turn the audio into text, and ask the lecturer first. The recording itself is trivial; what decides whether it is useful in three weeks is where the phone sat and whether you did anything with the recording on the day.

The whole-term version of this, with what to do at revision time, is recording lectures on iPhone.

Before you press record: permission and placement

Ask. Most lecturers say yes. A recording made after asking is one you can use in a study group without it being awkward.

Placement matters more than any setting. Phone flat on the desk, screen up, pointing at the speaker. Not in a bag, not in a pocket, not under a notebook. The difference between a transcript that works and one that does not is usually twenty centimetres and a layer of fabric.

Do Not Disturb on. A call takes the microphone. In Limemo an incoming call pauses the recording and it resumes when the microphone is free — but you will still have a gap where the call was.

Check storage and battery before a two-hour session. Fifty minutes of audio is small, but a phone at 6% is a phone that stops recording.

What a plain recording leaves you with

A lecture that exists only as audio is a lecture you have to sit through twice.

Fifty minutes of audio is not notes. Nothing tells the lecturer apart from a question at the back of the room, and there is no summary, so revising means listening to all fifty minutes again.

Record in Limemo and get study notes

Same recording, and the notes exist by the time you have walked out of the building.

1. Start the recording. In the app, tap + and choose New Record — or start it straight from a Home Screen or Lock Screen widget.
2. Put the phone down and listen. Capture keeps running with the screen locked or the app in the background, and while the recording screen is open the phone will not auto-lock.
3. Stop, and the note is created. It moves through five visible steps — processed, transcribed, speakers identified, key points highlighted, finishing up. From Transcribing onward you can leave the screen.
4. Read the transcript. The voices are separated, so the lecturer and the questions from the room stay apart. Rename them once if you want real names.
5. Pick the Study summary. It gives a lecture the structure the subject has rather than the order things were said in — which is what you want three weeks later.
6. Ask it things. What was the example for the second case? is unanswerable from notes and trivial from a transcript.

What you walk out with is not a file to deal with later. It is the lecture as a document: searchable, split by voice, with the Study summary at the top and the audio still underneath it for the one sentence you want to hear again in the exact words it was said in.

A recording is never lost, which is what a two-hour session rests on. An interruption pauses it and it picks up again, sometimes after a tap; a full disk ends a recording of ten seconds or more with a save; a failed upload leaves it on the main screen to try again.

Record from your Apple Watch in a seminar

A phone on the desk in a twelve-person seminar is a statement. A watch is not.

Start the recording from the Limemo app on your watch, or from the watch’s own widget, and leave your phone in your bag. When the transfer completes, the recording arrives on your iPhone as the same kind of note — transcript, speaker labels, summary. Only one recording transfers at a time, and the audio stays on the watch until your phone confirms it saved the note, so nothing is riding on the timing. Recording on Apple Watch covers what happens on the wrist, and what to check if a recording has not appeared covers the rest.

Getting a clean recording in a lecture hall

• A quiet lecturer in a big hall. Move forward a few rows, or put the phone at the edge of the desk. Twenty centimetres closer does more than any setting.
• An echoey room. Closer is the fix here too — a hard-surfaced hall is where placement earns its keep.
• Two-hour sessions. What ends a Limemo recording is the phone running out of free space, and even then it ends with a save.
• Several people talking at once. Overlapping voices are the hard case for any transcript. Rename the voices once and a seminar reads as a conversation — and where two people talk over each other, check it against the audio sitting under it.
• The language. It is detected from the audio, so there is nothing to set. The transcript is written once, in the language the lecture was given in, and it stays in those words. Revising in another language is a summary setting rather than a transcription one.

Frequently asked questions

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