How to record a Google Meet call in your browser
A Google Meet call you have joined in Chrome or Edge is audio your own browser is already playing. That is the whole basis of the method below: nothing has to dial into the call, nothing has to be admitted, and nothing has to be uploaded, because the sound is already on your machine. This page is the how, including the parts that do not work.
If Meet’s own recording is available on your account and you are the person entitled to use it, use that instead — it is the host’s route and it announces itself to the room. This page is for the case where it is not available, or where what you want is a searchable transcript rather than a file to scrub through.
What you need
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Chrome or Edge | Those are the only browsers with a build. Firefox and Safari are not supported, and neither is the optional extension |
| The call open in a browser tab | The audio is captured from the tab. This is the ordinary way to join Meet, so on this platform it is rarely a constraint |
| A connection, once | The transcription model is downloaded the first time and cached. After that, transcription works with the network off |
| No account | Recording, transcription, speaker separation, search and every export format are free and run on your own hardware |
Recording the call
- Join the meeting as yourself, in a tab. You are a normal participant; no extra guest arrives.
- Start the recorder. Either press the button on the site, or install the optional extension, which notices a Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or VooV call opening in a tab and offers once, quietly, as the call starts. The extension never begins a recording by itself — it hands the tab over and stops there.
- Read the consent screen out loud. Every recording opens on one, with words to say. It cannot be skipped or told to stop appearing, because whether you may record depends on where everyone in the call is and no program can work that out for you.
- Let it capture the tab and your microphone together, which is the default. Both sides of the conversation end up on one recording, and you can change microphone part-way through without breaking the file.
- Stop, and read. Whisper transcribes in the same tab, speakers are separated on your own device, and you get a note you can search and export.
Recording only your microphone will not work
This is the single most common way a first attempt is wasted, so it is worth its own heading. Your browser’s echo cancellation strips out whatever is coming from your speakers — on a call, that is everyone except you. Record only the microphone and you get a recording of yourself saying “mm” at intervals. Capturing the tab as well is the default, and the application warns you if you turn it off mid-call.
Screen recording, or a transcript?
These are searched for interchangeably and they are different products, so: this does not produce a video of your screen. It captures the tab’s audio and your microphone, and what comes out is a transcript with the audio optionally kept alongside it. Exports are subtitles (SRT and VTT), Markdown, plain text, JSON, CSV and HTML — no video file among them.
If you need the slides on video, a screen recorder is the right tool and this is not it. If what you actually wanted was to find the sentence where the date changed, a transcript gets you there in a search box instead of a scrub bar, and the subtitle exports will lay themselves over a video somebody else recorded.
What you have afterwards
Speakers separated and labelled through the transcript, so a long call reads as a conversation rather than a wall of text. Decisions, action items, deadlines, open questions and topics pulled out of the transcript and linked back to the moment they were said. Transcription in 99 languages, with the language detected every few seconds rather than chosen once, so a call that moves between English and Chinese comes back in both scripts on one timeline. Search across every meeting you have kept. All of that is free, and all of it runs in the tab.
Three things use a server of ours instead, and are bought as credits: AI-written minutes, a question asked across your whole library, and translating a finished transcript. Those send the transcript text and never the audio, and the exact price is on the button before you press it. A fuller account of which host is contacted when is on the privacy page.
What it cannot do
- Chrome and Edge only. Firefox and Safari have no build, and neither does the extension.
- It is not a screen recorder. Audio in, transcript out. See above.
- It does not make you the host or give you anybody else’s recording. The transcript is yours, on your machine, and nobody else can see it.
- Speaker separation has a shape. It works well for two or three distinct voices and struggles with similar voices, crosstalk, and one person who changes microphone mid-call. You can set the number of people by hand and move any line to someone else.
- One device. Notes live in your own browser’s storage. Nothing syncs, clearing site data removes them permanently, and we cannot recover them because we never had them. Export what you need to keep.
- It cannot tell you whether you may record. That is the consent screen’s job and yours, not the software’s.
The same mechanism on the other two platforms: recording a Microsoft Teams meeting, where the browser-tab requirement actually bites, and recording a Zoom meeting as a participant, where the interesting question is the host’s permission. If a note taker somebody else invited is already in your Meet calls, that is a different page.
Record a meeting · Questions before you start · Where the audio goes
Every capability and limit above is one this site states about itself — the feature list, the pricing table and the eight questions on the home page, and the host table on the privacy page — and was checked against them on 1 October 2026. Nothing here is a claim about Google Meet’s own recording, its plans or its buttons: no menu path from Meet is reproduced, because that is the part that goes stale, and a stale instruction reads as authoritative while being wrong.