The call transcription feature automatically converts call recordings into text using AI. Every new call recording is transcribed in the background, and the finished transcript is displayed in the ticket right below the recording. The transcription is managed by OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model.
Note: To have access to the call transcription feature, it is required to have call recording enabled for your numbers or call buttons, and your account has to be integrated with an OpenAI AI provider.
How it works
As soon as a call ends and its recording is created, the system requests a transcription of it and processes it in the background. The audio is sent to your OpenAI provider, which returns the spoken text together with the language it detected. The whole workflow is automatic, so agents are not required to initiate or manage the transcription process. Once finished, the transcript simply appears in the ticket.
Note: At this moment, transcription applies only to recordings created since the feature was enabled. Already existing recordings are not retroactively transcribed.
Enabling call transcription
To enable the feature, navigate to Configuration > Call > Settings and check the "Enable call transcription" checkbox, and save the settings.
Note: The checkbox is displayed only if an OpenAI AI provider is connected in your account.
By enabling the feature, you also confirm that recording and transcribing your calls complies with the laws applicable to you and to your callers - see Data protection below.
Reading a call transcript in a ticket
The transcript is located in the same place as the recording to which it belongs, below the audio player with the transcribed recording. The transcription shows one of three states:
- "Transcription in progress..." - the recording has been queued, and the AI is working on it. The label is automatically replaced once the transcript is ready, it is not required to reload the ticket.
- "Show transcript" - the transcript is ready. Click to expand it, and "Hide transcript" to collapse it again. When the AI was able to identify the language of the call, the transcript is labelled with "Detected language: …".
- A short failure message - the transcript could not be produced. See Limits and unsuccessful transcriptions for what each message means.
Tip: The language of the call is detected automatically - you do not configure it anywhere, and you do not need a separate setup per language. A call in a language other than your account's language is transcribed in the language it was spoken in.
Limits and unsuccessful transcriptions
Not every recording can be turned into text. The most important limit is length: recordings longer than 30 minutes are not transcribed. Very long calls are reported with a failure message instead of a partial transcript, so it is clear that nothing was silently truncated.
When a transcript cannot be produced, the ticket shows the reason:
- "Recording too long to transcribe." - the recording exceeds the supported length.
- "Transcription is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." - the AI provider could not be reached or was rate-limited. Transient problems like these are retried automatically for a while before the transcript is reported as failed.
- "The recording was deleted before it could be transcribed." - the recording (or its ticket) was removed while the transcription was still queued.
- "Transcription is not available for your account." - the AI provider rejected the request, most commonly because the configured OpenAI credentials are missing, invalid or lack access to the model.
Note: A recording that failed to transcribe keeps its failure message - it is not picked up again automatically, and it cannot be re-submitted from the ticket. A call whose recording was never created (because recording was not enabled for that number or button) has no transcript section at all.
Data protection
A call transcript is a verbatim text of what your customer said, so it deserves the same care as the recording it comes from:
- Transcript text is encrypted at rest with your account's own encryption key, in the same way as other personal data LiveAgent stores on your behalf.
- Access to a transcript follows access to its ticket - an agent who cannot open the ticket cannot read the call's transcript.
- Deleting the recording or purging the ticket removes the transcript with it. See Call recordings for the ways to remove a recording.
- The audio is sent to your configured AI provider for processing, which means an external service processes the call audio. Enabling the feature is your confirmation that you have the caller consent this requires.
Tip: The standard way to obtain consent is an IVR welcome message, played to the caller when the call is initiated, announcing that the call is being recorded.