Writing along in a lecture and understanding it at the same time rarely works. A recording plus a transcript lets you listen first and look things up later – and a summary shows you what mattered.
Before the lecture
- Ask first. Many universities and lecturers allow recordings for personal study, some do not. Ask and respect the answer; do not share recordings.
- Place the device well. A phone or laptop close to the speaker beats a good microphone in the back row.
From recording to summary
- Import. Drag the recording (M4A from the phone, MP3, WAV, or the lecture video) into Lautnote. Tip: set up the folder your phone syncs to as a watched folder – then every new recording is transcribed on its own.
- Your own words. Add technical terms and names of the course once – they will be spelled right in every lecture.
- Summary with the “Lecture” template. You get the main points and open questions, each with a timestamp to jump into the recording.
- Ask questions. “What did she say about the exam?” or “How was the confidence interval defined?” – Lautnote answers only from the transcript and shows the passage. If the lecture did not cover it, Lautnote says so.
- Into your notes. Export as Markdown for Obsidian, OneNote or any notes app.
On a laptop without a graphics card
Lautnote also runs on the processor. Use “Fast”: on our 6-core test PC an hour of audio took about 20 minutes. A summary on the processor takes longer – about 23 minutes for an hour with the smaller model – so let it run while you do something else.
Summaries from small language models can contain mistakes. Use the timestamps to check what you want to learn.