How accurate it is, and what to check
Speech recognition is very good, and it still makes mistakes. These are the things it gets wrong most often:
- Names of people and places, especially ones it hasn't heard often.
- Numbers and amounts, which matter most in a dispute.
- Background noise and quiet speech, such as a note recorded in a car or on the street.
- Several people talking at once.
Your record says on its first page that voice notes were written out by speech recognition and can contain mistakes. If a note matters to your case, listen to the original while you read the text. Keep the chat on your phone so the audio is still there if someone asks to hear it.
WhatsApp's own transcripts
WhatsApp can also write out voice messages on your phone. You turn it on under Settings, then Chats, then Voice message transcripts, and then press and hold a voice message and tap Transcribe. WhatsApp says this happens on your device and that it supports a limited set of languages.
That's a good, free choice if you want to read one or two notes yourself. It gives you text on your screen, one message at a time. It doesn't give you something to hand to someone else.
What happens to the audio
While you read, the audio stays on your device and you can play it in your browser. When you order a record, each voice note goes to our server and then to Google's Gemini API to be written out, or to OpenAI's API if Google is down. We delete each audio file as soon as that's done. The security page has the whole path.
