Live dictation or recorded audio: what is the difference?
Live dictation turns speech into text while the person is still talking. Recorded transcription starts from a finished audio file. Both are speech-to-text, but they're set up and used differently.
Live (streaming) transcription
Makers often call the live kind streaming. Amazon describes streaming transcriptions as those that "Transcribe media streams in real time"1. Google explains that streaming recognition "recognizes live audio as it is captured from a microphone"2.
OpenAI's guidance points to a separate live mode "for audio that is still arriving from a microphone, call, or media stream"3.
Text appears as you speak, so you can see mistakes at once. The cost is that the tool has less audio to go on at any moment, so it can't wait and judge a word by what comes later. Treat that as a general design point, and check each maker's page for how its live mode behaves.
Recorded (batch) transcription
Amazon calls the file-based kind batch. In its words, batch transcriptions "Transcribe media files that have been uploaded"1. OpenAI says to use file transcription "when you have a completed recording or a bounded audio request"3.
You hand over the whole file and get a transcript back. Meeting recordings, interviews and voicemail usually go this way.
Trade-offs to know
Live tools split audio into small chunks. Google notes that "Larger frames are more efficient, but add latency"2. Latency here means the delay before text shows up.
| Live dictation | Recorded file | |
|---|---|---|
| Audio source | A microphone or stream | A saved file |
| When text appears | While speaking | After the file is processed |
| Typical use | Drafting notes or emails by voice | Meetings, interviews, calls |
Features and limits can differ
The same maker may treat the two modes differently. Amazon warns that "feature and language support differs for batch and streaming transcriptions"1. A feature you saw for files might not exist for live use, and the other way round.
Limits differ too. OpenAI's file page says "Files can be up to 25 MB"3. That figure was checked on 2026-10-26 and applies to that maker's file route only. A long meeting may need splitting or a different file format. See how to read a tool's documentation for finding such limits.
Which one fits
Think about what you'll do with the result. If you want words on the screen right now, live is the match. If you want a record of a conversation to search later, a saved file is.
Voice typing suits short text you'd otherwise type. A saved recording suits a conversation between several people, where you also want speaker labels.
Either way, the text still needs checking. Anything that reaches a maker's servers also raises the questions on the privacy page.
Notes and sources
- How Amazon Transcribe works, Amazon Web Services
- Speech-to-Text best practices, Google Cloud
- Speech to text, OpenAI
Keep reading
How speech-to-text works, in plain EnglishHow software turns a recording of someone talking into written words, and what the main parts of a transcription tool do.
Why transcripts get words wrongWhy speech-to-text misses names, accents, jargon and people talking over each other, and which factors affect accuracy.
Speaker labels and timestamps explainedHow a transcription tool marks who said what and when, what diarization means, and why the labels can be wrong.