Audio transcription: read the conversation audio as text

Overview

Audio transcription turns conversation audio into text and shows that text under the player, inside the message bubble itself. Agents read the message without pressing play — useful in a noisy room, when handling several conversations at once, and for finding an old voice note later by what was said in it.

It works on any channel that can receive audio: WhatsApp (Cloud and Web), Telegram, SMS, Line, Messenger, Instagram, email, the website widget, the API channel and call recordings. The setup is the same for all of them.

Three decisions, in this order:

• On or off on the inbox. Every new inbox starts off.
• Which audio it covers: what the contact sent, what the agent recorded, or both.
• An exception per conversation, when one conversation needs to behave differently from the rest of the inbox.

Prerequisites

• An OpenAI or Groq API key available to the account. Configure it in Settings → Integrations, or ask the platform operator to configure it on the server.
• Administrator access to configure the inbox.
• Access to the conversation to create a one-off exception.

The screen tells you whether a key exists: a Key configured or No key badge appears at the top of the tab. Without a key, transcription cannot produce any text at all — so it is worth checking that badge before turning the feature on.

Step by step

Turn it on for the inbox

1. Open Settings → Inboxes and select the inbox.
2. Open the Audio transcription tab.
3. Check the key badge at the top. If it reads No key, use the link to configure the integration before continuing.
4. Turn Audio transcription on.
5. Choose the scope with the two switches below:
   • Transcribe audio received from contacts — on by default.
   • Transcribe audio recorded by agents — off on new inboxes; inboxes that already existed come with it on, preserving what they were already doing.

Each switch saves on its own, the moment you change it.

Adjust a single conversation

1. Open the conversation and expand Audio transcription in the right sidebar.
2. The panel shows the current policy and which audio is being transcribed there.
3. Use Adjust for this conversation and pick the policy:
   • Follow the inbox — the default.
   • Always transcribe — applies even when the inbox has transcription switched off.
   • Never transcribe — turns it off for this conversation only.
4. With Always transcribe you can still set each scope separately, or leave it inheriting the inbox.
5. Click Save.

Settings and options

A new inbox starts with agent audio off on purpose: it spends AI producing text the agent just spoke. An inbox that already existed keeps transcribing agent audio, because that is what it was already doing — the update does not switch anything off on its own. If you do not need that text, turn the switch off and the spend stops.

Use cases

• Audio-heavy support: the team reads the message in seconds and replies in text.
• Searching the history: transcribed text is searchable, so an old voice note becomes findable by what was said in it.
• A sensitive conversation: one conversation can stay on Never transcribe even with the inbox switched on.
• A controlled pilot: enable transcription only on the inbox you want to evaluate before rolling it out.

Tips, limits and best practices

• The per-file limit is 25 MB. Larger audio is not transcribed.
• Supported formats: flac, m4a, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpga, oga, ogg, wav and webm. Older formats such as amr and 3gp are not transcribed — the bubble says so instead of staying empty.
• The language is detected automatically. When the conversation already has a known language, it is used as a hint to improve the result.
• The transcription appears on its own, with no page reload.
• Transcribed text can also be translated — see the automatic translation article at the end.

Troubleshooting

The audio bubble shows no text at all. Check, in this order: the inbox has Audio transcription on; the scope matching the direction of that audio is on; the conversation is not set to Never transcribe; and the badge at the top of the tab reads Key configured.

The bubble shows a notice instead of the text. The notice says exactly what happened:

The "Try again" button is not there. It only appears for failures a second attempt could actually fix. An unsupported format or an oversized file would fail again in exactly the same way.

We are paying for AI on audio we do not need. Switch Transcribe audio recorded by agents off on the inbox. It is the most common source of spend that produces no value.

See also

• Inbox settings
• Real-time automatic translation