Short answer first: there is no single best app, but there is a fast way to narrow the field. Start with what your university already pays for. Then find out whether you are allowed to record at all, because that decides which tools are usable. Only then compare the paid options.
Most "best app" lists skip the first two steps. That is how students end up paying for something their college gives away, or paying for something they are not allowed to use.
What does your college already give you?
Trinity, UCD and DCU all give their students Microsoft 365 at no cost. Check your own IT services page rather than assuming, but if you have it, you already own a transcription tool.
Word's Transcribe feature turns an uploaded recording into timestamped text. What Microsoft's documentation says about it:
- 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month on a standard Microsoft 365 subscription.
- 80 or more locales supported.
- Word on the web in Edge or Chrome, and Word on Windows.
- Education licences vary. Test it in September rather than finding out in December that yours does not include it.
The other thing you already have is your VLE, and if your lecturer publishes a recording there, that is the copy you are meant to use:
- Trinity. Blackboard, with Panopto for lecture capture.
- UCD, TU Dublin and the University of Limerick. Brightspace.
- UCC and the University of Galway. Canvas.
- Maynooth. Moodle.
- DCU. Loop, which is Moodle underneath.
One warning before you plan around this. In Panopto, downloading is switched off unless staff enable it for the folder or for the individual session. Open one of your own sessions this week and look for a download button. Very often there is not one, so a plan that depends on pulling the video file out and feeding it to another tool will fail in week three. There is more on how the systems differ in lecture capture at Irish universities.
Are you allowed to record at all?
At every university below, the lecturer decides, and you have to ask first.
- Trinity. Recordings are a learning aid and do not replace in-person attendance. They stay inside Trinity's VLE for registered students, and unauthorised sharing results in disciplinary action.
- UCC. You may record with advance written permission from staff. The recording is for study, revision and exam preparation only, and covert recording is strictly prohibited.
- UCD. Permission first, personal study only. Recording without permission, or passing a recording on, can bring disciplinary measures.
We went through the published wording institution by institution in can you record lectures in Ireland.
This changes which apps make sense. Anything that works by sending a bot into your online class, or by recording quietly in the background, is a poor fit for a system built on asking first. A recorder you start deliberately, after you have a yes, matches the rules you are actually under.
Which four things actually decide it?
- Price in euro. A dollar subscription moves with the exchange rate every month, and some cards add a fee on top. Small, but it is the kind of small that matters on a student budget.
- Language. Not just whether the tool lists your language, but how it handles it. Some make you choose before you record and will not let you change your mind afterwards.
- Notes or transcript. These are different products. A transcript of a fifty-minute lecture is roughly seven thousand words that you now have to read. We wrote about the gap in transcription is not the same as notes.
- Where the audio goes. Ask where files are stored, then ask separately which country the speech-to-text processing happens in. The answers are often different, and vendors are often vague about the second one.
Write those four down before you open a single pricing page. Whichever one binds hardest for you is the one that picks the tool.
Otter
The free Basic plan gives you 300 minutes of transcription a month. The catch is file imports: three, ever, not three a month. If your plan is to record on your phone and upload afterwards, the free plan closes to you in the first week.
Pro is 16.99 US dollars a month billed monthly, or 8.33 a month billed annually, and raises you to 1,200 minutes and ten imports a month. Priced in dollars, so the euro figure moves.
Language is the hard limit. Otter transcribes English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified). The language is an account setting rather than a per-recording choice, and Otter's help centre tells you to select it before the recording starts.
Use it if your module is taught in English and you record live. Set the language once, at the start of term, and check it before your first lecture.
Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM
Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook in July 2026. Existing notebooks and links carried over, so it is the same tool under a new name.
It does not record anything. You bring it a file. Upload audio and it transcribes at import, then keeps the text as a source you can question, summarise and turn into study material. Each source can run to 500,000 words or 200 MB, and a free notebook holds up to 50 sources. That 200 MB ceiling is generous by the standards of this list and will swallow a full lecture without complaint.
The missing half is the recording itself. You still need something to capture the lecture and a way to get the file off it, which puts you back at the Panopto download problem, or at your phone.
Use it as the second half of a pair. Decide what makes the recording first.
Notion
Notion's pricing page lists Free, Plus at 9.50 euro per member per month, and Business at 19.50 euro per member per month. Euro pricing is a real advantage.
The catch is which plan includes transcription. AI Meeting Notes, the feature that records and transcribes, is a limited trial on Free and Plus and only properly included on Business. That makes Notion the most expensive way on this page to get a lecture transcribed.
Use the free plan to keep and organise notes you made elsewhere. Do not buy a plan here for the transcription.
What your phone already does
- Pixel. The Recorder app transcribes a recording, and Google's language list for it includes English (Ireland) specifically, which not every tool bothers with. Note that Google's help page says re-transcribing may process audio files on Google servers, so not all of it stays on the phone. Recorder is Pixel only, not Samsung, not any other Android handset.
- iPhone. Voice Memos produces a transcript at no extra cost, on iPhone 12 and later, since iOS 18.
Both are free and both are genuinely useful. Both also stop at a transcript. You get the words, not the structure, and none of the flashcards or questions that make revision actually happen. Record your next lecture on the phone you own before you pay anyone for the same thing.
If your module is taught through Irish
This is where most of the market stops. Otter's six languages do not include Irish, and Irish is missing from the language lists of most general-purpose transcription tools.
There is an Irish-specific answer. Fotheidil, at fotheidil.abair.ie, is a free web transcription service for Irish built by the ABAIR initiative at Trinity College Dublin, with backing that includes the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, and COGG. You upload an audio or video file and it returns an Irish transcript with punctuation and capitalisation restored, and it separates speakers. Its developers describe it as the first web-based transcription system for the Irish language.
It is a transcription service, not a study tool, so the revision work on the output is still yours. For a lecture as Gaeilge, it is the option that exists.
If you have a disability accommodation
Talk to your college's Disability or Access Service before you spend anything. The Fund for Students with Disabilities covers assistive technology, and AHEAD, which works on access and disability across Irish higher education, is clear that it is not paid to you. AHEAD also lists note-taking technologies in its AT Hive resource.
- Register with your college's Disability or Access Service.
- They assess what you need.
- They apply to the fund on your behalf.
An accommodation can also settle the recording permission question. At UCD, a recording device is recommended as a reasonable accommodation to ensure full access to lecture content, and the student signs up to conditions on how the recordings are used:
- Personal use only. Recordings are for your own use, for completing the course you are registered on.
- Never shared. No copying, no lending, no making a lecture recording available to anyone else, under any circumstances.
- Kept secure. You have to take the necessary precautions to secure recordings against unlawful use by another person.
- Enforced. A breach is a breach of UCD's disciplinary regulations and goes to the Registrar or their nominee under the UCD Student Code.
Read those conditions before you sign, because they rule out the sharing that students do casually, like sending a recording to a classmate who missed the lecture.
When should you sort this out?
In week one. UCD's academic year for 2026/27 shows how little slack there is:
- Autumn. Teaching runs 7 September to 27 November 2026, twelve weeks. Revision to 4 December, exams 5 to 19 December.
- Spring. Teaching 18 January to 5 March 2027, then a two-week fieldwork and study period, then teaching again 22 March to 23 April. Revision to 30 April, exams 1 to 15 May.
- Summer. Teaching 17 May to 6 August 2027, revision to 13 August, exams 14 to 21 August.
UCD's calendar also marks the October bank holiday on 26 October 2026, St Brigid's Day on 1 February 2027, St Patrick's Day on 17 March 2027 and Good Friday on 26 March 2027. Other Irish universities set their own dates, so look up your own before you plan around these.
Twelve weeks of autumn teaching is the whole supply. Spend three of them deciding and you have lost a quarter of the lectures you meant to capture.
How to choose in five minutes
- Log into your IT services page and find out whether you have Microsoft 365. If you do, test Word's Transcribe on a ten-minute recording this week.
- Email one lecturer and ask about recording. Their answer tells you whether you are shopping for a recorder or for a file processor.
- Pick on the constraint that binds hardest. If it is language, that decides it before price does. If it is money, the free tiers of Gemini Notebook and your own phone will cover more of the term than you expect. If it is time, the question stops being who transcribes best and becomes who turns fifty minutes of speech into something you can revise from.
Where Notibo fits
Notibo records a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and gives back a transcript, structured notes and flashcards. The free plan covers 30 minutes of recording a month, Pro is 9.99 euro a month with a seven-day trial on the monthly plan, and uploads are capped at 50 MB, a quarter of what Gemini Notebook accepts, so a long uncompressed recording may need converting first. It transcribes 89 languages, including five varieties of English. On the data question the honest answer is a split one: files are stored in the EU, but the audio itself goes to speech-to-text providers in the United States to be transcribed. If your requirement is that the recording never leaves the EU, that rules it out, and it rules out most of the other options on this page too. Ask that question of every tool you consider, and treat a vague answer as a no.