How to transcribe a press conference on deadline

Getting clean audio in the room

• Use the press mult (also called a press box or mult box) when the organizer provides one. It splits the podium microphone into several mic-level outputs, so you get the speaker without room noise. Plug into an output, never the input: the input expects a line-level feed from the mixer, and a microphone plugged there gives little or no signal.
• No mult? Put your phone on the podium or as close to the speaker as you're allowed, in airplane mode so calls don't interrupt the recording.
• Reporters' questions are often hard to hear on the house feed. A second phone recording from your seat catches them. Upload each recording separately: combining files joins them end to end, which would repeat the event.
• If you record in the browser, keep the screen on and the page open. Phone browsers can pause the microphone when the screen locks.

Free and built-in options

If you only need one sentence, scrubbing the audio by hand is still fastest. Some phones also transcribe on their own: Google's Recorder app on Pixel phones and Voice Memos on recent iPhones show a transcript of what you recorded.

Those are fine for a single quote. Dolcenota helps when the event is long, when several people talk, when it's in Spanish or switches between English and Spanish, or when you need to find answers fast and export a clean document for your editor.

Keeping track of who said what

Verify every quote before you file

An AI transcript is a working draft, not the record. Before you publish, find each quote's timestamp, like [00:12:31], open your recording at that point and listen. Names, numbers and negations ("we will" vs. "we won't") are where errors hurt most. Every export notes that it's AI-generated and may contain errors, and the transcript is not a certified record.