Top recommended AI summary tools for long academic lectures?

Question

I am so hyped because I finally started my grad program in international relations and the professors are brilliant but oh my god they talk so fast and for so long. We're talking three hour seminars twice a week and my hand literally hurts from trying to keep up with notes. I need something that can actually handle the academic jargon without hallucinating some weird stuff. I've been looking at Otter.ai because everyone says it's the gold standard for transcription but then I saw Glean and it looks like it's specifically built for students which sounds perfect?

But Glean is kinda pricey and I'm on a super strict student budget living in London (everything is so expensive here lol). I also saw some people talking about just recording on their phone and dumping it into a custom GPT but I'm worried about the file size limits since these lectures are massive. I have my first big mid-term coming up in like three weeks and I really need to get my workflow sorted before I drown in all this audio. Between Otter and Glean, which one actually does a better job at summarizing the key points and not just giving me a wall of text? Or is there some secret third option I'm missing that wont break the bank?

Dizaynersk_yvsr · Accepted Answer

I have been using these tools for a few years now and honestly, Glean is nice but way too pricey for a London budget. If you are trying to save money, check if your uni gives you a free login for Microsoft 365 Education. The web version of Word has a transcribe tool that is decent for seminars and wont cost you extra. For better summaries without the wall of text, try these:

Notta.ai Pro Plan is usually cheaper than Otter and handles 5-hour uploads easily.

Otter.ai Pro Monthly gives you more minutes but the AI summary is sometimes hit or miss with IR jargon. Tbh, i found that recording on a Sony ICD-PX470 Digital Voice Recorder then dumping the file into a free transcriber is the move. Then just paste the text into Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It handles long academic context way better than GPT and it is less likely to hallucinate the complex stuff.

fxihzfpflu · Answer

Saw this thread today and thought id chime in. When I was doing my IR seminars last year, I spent way too much time worrying about whether the AI would actually understand the nuance of geopolitical theories. I ended up trying Descript Creator Plan after a few failed attempts with cheaper phone apps. The thing with tools like Otter is that they're great for meetings, but academic jargon sometimes trips them up. I found that Descript was more reliable for me because it highlights the audio as you read the text, so if a sentence looked weird, I could just click it and hear what the professor actually said. It really helped when I was trying to verify specific quotes for my midterm. I also tried Fireflies.ai Pro Plan for a bit but it felt a bit too corporate for what I needed. If you go the custom GPT route, just be careful about the token limits... three hours of audio is a massive amount of data to process in one go, so I usually split my files into smaller chunks to keep the summaries accurate.

ylpvrksuol · Answer

Quick reply while I have a sec! Like someone mentioned, the budget struggle in London is so real, and I totally get the panic of trying to keep up with those fast-talking professors. I went through a huge trial-and-error phase last term where I was just desperate to find a workflow that didnt cost a fortune but also didnt mess up the complex theories we were discussing. Its honestly so amazing when you finally find a rhythm, but I have a massive warning for you based on my own experience! The biggest mistake I made was relying too much on the auto-summary features without checking the source transcript. I had one instance where the AI literally invented a whole new concept because it misheard a specific term about sovereign debt. If I hadnt double-checked the actual audio, I would have walked into my seminar sounding completely lost. It is fantastic technology, but you have to be so methodical about verifying the output, especially with IR jargon where one word changes the whole meaning. Also, please be careful about where you upload these long recordings! I didnt realize at first that some of the cheaper tools have really sketchy privacy policies. You dont want to accidentally leak your professors unpublished research or violate your schools data rules just to save a few quid. I love the efficiency, but definitely spend some time reading the fine print on data usage before you commit your whole semester to a random platform. I found that being a bit more hands-on with the editing actually helped me learn the material better anyway...