How To Record A Google Meet Call

If you often use Google Meet, it might be a good idea to record your conferences so you can still refer to them at a later date. Recording these calls and meetings can be a great help when it's time for subsequent reviews, updates, and helping absent team members catch up on the meeting discussion.

Google Meet allows the users to record meetings, but only under strict conditions, and not everyone knows how to do it right. For starters, if you have a personal account on Google Meet, you can't record the calls. Instead, you should have an Enterprise plan and a Google Suite account.

In this article, you can know all about Google Meet recordings.

Can You Record A Google Meet Call Using Your Account?

First, understand the purpose of a Google Meet recording.

For instance, do you want to share meeting minutes or content with participants absent in this meeting? Essentially the call recording is for other co-workers to watch later. In addition, Google Meet provides a G Suite administrator account specifically for recording.

However, not all the participants or G Suite customers can record the Google Meet call/conference. You can only record or access it if you have organized the meeting (organizer), are in the same company as the organizer or have a G Suite account.

While Google Meet lets you record a call, it charges you a certain fee per month for you to be able to record your Google Meet chats, specifically video meetings.

Even having the recording functionality through the G Suite account, leveraging the option of recording within Google Meet has some drawbacks. First, you need to submit requests to all the members in a call/meeting asking for their permission to record the call's activities.

While this might be helpful in terms of confidentiality and privacy, waiting for all the participants to accept consent before you begin to record a meeting can be inefficient and time-consuming.

Another aspect of being mindful is that if a person refuses to agree, it may result in incomplete recording, leading to the loss of essential dialogues.

Apart from that, if your company has not enabled the recording feature for your specific account, you may not or may see it on your Google Meet's screen.

Is It A Good Idea To Record Meetings?

There are a couple of reasons and perks of recording your conversations and calls on Google Meet.

For starters, you might require to record a presentation or a meeting for screen sharing and documentation. Moreover, you can also share the details of a project across the globe irrespective of your team members' location and coordinate seamlessly. Also, you can better connect with new employees.

Once you have recorded Google Meet calls, you can easily share the recording with your co-workers if they were unable to attend the specific meeting. With most video conferencing apps and tools, recording is a standard feature. Also, it is plausible to record and successfully save your call recordings, both Google Meet video calls, and audio calls.

Here are some of the reasons why you should record your meetings.

• You can re-watch your meeting calls or videos and save them to refer back to it later on, and be sure that you don't miss out on anything.
• You can easily share the meeting recordings with any employee, management team, or other relevant parties who weren't in attendance
• You can use the recorded meetings as reference points in upcoming meetings or make decisions later on.
• It eradicates distractions for professionals that mostly come from taking meeting notes during calls. That way, it also keeps the meeting participants more engaging and interactive if they are aware the call is being recorded.

What Can You Record In Google Meet Calls?

1. Active speaker. First of all, it records and saves the speaker's presentation. This gets saved in the recording folder of the organizer in "My Drive."
2. Participants' details. The service also captures the details of all the participants. And an attendee report maintains all the names and corresponding contact numbers.
3. Session. If any participant leaves the session and rejoins the conference, the program records that participant's first and last time. A session appears that shows the total duration they have spent in the meeting.
4. Save files. You can capture and save various class lists and exchange them on multiple devices.

In a business setting, Google Meet is more common and used by many businesses. Essentially, the G Suite account has three editions Basic, Enterprise and Business. They all comprise Google Meet. However, not all of them had the meeting recording feature. In March 2020, Google announced to offer all its G Suite enterprise members access to premium features, including the Google Meet recording feature.

Therefore, if your company uses the Business standard or Basic G Suite account, it is a great opportunity to take advantage of all the amazing features. These include adding almost 250 participants, live streaming, and the recording option.

How To Record A Google Meet Call?

If you are hosting or organizing the Google Meet conference from your firm's account, it is essential to make sure that you have the permission and rights to record a meeting.

Ask the IT staff or admin to help you set up the recording access for your account, and it should turn on automatically. This means that to record a Google Meet call, you need to be the meeting host/organizer.

To record Google Meet call, you need to follow these steps:

1. Open the Google Meet application or website on your PC/desktop or laptop. Unfortunately, you cannot record calls or conferences in Google Meet if you have joined the meeting via a mobile device
2. Click on Join or Start a meeting. It will begin the call. If you are a host, click on the Start
3. If you are a member, press the Join button. Next, click on the More option and select the " Start Recording button on the screen
4. The recording starts at this point
5. You can stop recording the meeting by clicking on "More" and selecting "Stop" recording. This is when the recording ends. And if all the participants leave the meeting, it will end the recording automatically.

The file then gets saved to the Google Drive of the meeting host/organizer in a titled "Meet Recordings" folder, and the saved recording link will also be emailed to the particular meeting organizer.

Anyone who starts and stops the recording gets a shareable link to the meeting recording via email that you can preview whenever you want to. The recording is saved in mp4 file format.

When you record a meeting, the participants can see the speaker in the recording. Presentations via screen sharing also appear in the recording. However, it is a good practice to notify all the meeting participants that the call is being recorded.

Additionally, the Meet app also saves the meeting chat log as a part of the recording that you can view later with access to the call recording. The captions during the live conference are not included in the final recording.

The meeting organizer's Google Drive has all the recordings saved in the Meet recordings folder. The permissible users can easily download it.

Be mindful that the administrator has enabled the record function and Google Drive for the Google Meet recording to work.

How To Transcribe A Google Meet Call Recording?

You can use automated transcription services to transcribe and access closed captions for your Google Meet calls. Meetings are transcribed in real-time, and your transcripts get saved right to your account, making it easier for you to share.

1. Step1. To begin, you need to download Otter.ai's Google Chrome extension from Web Store. Once you download it, open your Meet app and click on the icon of Otter extension on the top right.

1. Step 2. You need to sign up for the Otter account in order to use this extension. If you already have one, you can log in to your account. Also, you have the flexibility and option to use your Microsoft account, Google account, email address or, Apple account to sign up.

1. Step 3. Once you create your Otter account, there will be. a 'Record' button when you will access the extension. Click on the button to get started with the recording process.

1. Step 4. You will be able to see live transcriptions for the Google Meet calls. This can be helpful to review important points later or stay tuned effectively.
2. Step 5. You can also press the 'CC' button to open the panel of closed captions. When the meeting ends, press the Pause button to stop or resume recording.

1. Step 6. Otter saves the meeting/call transcription automatically to your account. You can then access it from the folder 'My Conversations' in the left toolbar. Here, you can find the transcriptions of all Google Meet calls recordings.

You can now access any of your meeting transcriptions, share audio, export them as text, or delete them. For export options, you need to click on the vertical dots menu in the top right.

How Does Otter Enhance This Experience?

Google Meet recording sessions allow you to rerun the audio and refer to it. However, while meeting minutes and notes are helpful tools that help you capture the most critical parts of a call, they aren't a substitute for a word to word meeting recordings.

A robust and automated transcription service like Otter.ai helps you transcribe recordings seamlessly and provides closed captions for all your Google Meet videos. With Otter, you can transcribe your Google Meet recordings in real-time, and all your transcripts are saved straightaway to your Otter account that you can access later.

The platform has a Google Meet-specific Google Chrome extension that helps with transcription. You can record Google Meet video calls with precision.

Once you record the Google Meet call, Otter lets you capture and share all the essentials and valuable moments from your interviews, meetings, and everyday discussions. You have free access to all these resources that help you save time, stay focused, and work more efficiently.

Leveraging AI, Otter accurately listens to your recording conversations/discussions and generates "smart notes" – precise, machine-generated text in synchronization and enriched with speaker tags, summary keywords, and audio.