The live transcript is produced word by word while the conversation is still happening. It has to commit to what it heard within a moment of hearing it, using only what came before.

The final transcript is produced afterwards, with the whole recording available at once. That changes what is possible:

  • Later context corrects earlier guesses. A company or person's name that was ambiguous at minute two is often obvious by minute forty, and the final pass can go back and fix it.
  • Speaker separation improves once every voice has been heard for a full call rather than a few seconds.
  • Crosstalk gets untangled with the benefit of hindsight, where the live pass had to guess in real time.
  • The text is cleaned. Filler, repetition and interruptions are removed, and the conversation is parsed into question-and-answer blocks, so it reads as call notes rather than raw dictation.

Treat the live transcript as a prompt for your attention during the call, and the final transcript as the record. If you copy a quote out mid-call, check it against the final version before it goes anywhere.

Questions

Which one is correct?

The final one. It had strictly more information available. Where they disagree, the final transcript is the version to trust.

The live transcript got a name wrong. Do I need to fix it?

No. Corrections you would make to the live text are largely what the final pass does on its own. Fix things in the final transcript, where the fix persists.

Why show a live transcript at all if it is the less accurate one?

Because its value is timing rather than accuracy. Seeing the conversation as text while it happens helps you notice a thread you meant to follow up, catch a number you missed, and stay present instead of writing everything down. None of that is served by a perfect transcript that arrives an hour later.

My final transcript is much shorter than the live one was.

Expected, and by a large margin. Cleaning typically removes a third to a half of the verbatim text, because filler, repetition and interruptions are stripped and the conversation is reorganised into question-and-answer blocks. The result is deliberately closer to notes than to a word-for-word record. The Original tab still holds every word if you need it.

My call has no cleaned transcript at all.

It is filed as a Meeting. Cleaning only runs on interviews. See meetings and interviews.

Is the cleaned transcript reviewed by anyone?

Cleaning is its own stage with a human review step, aimed at mistranscriptions, proper nouns and over-summarising. The detail of how that works is described in how to clean transcripts in Junior's web documentation.