u/OfficialNotability

We recently sat down with the engineers behind one of our most requested features to talk about how it was built and some of the challenges they had to solve along the way.

It was built to solve a real user problem

• Many users record long lectures and meetings
• Traditional transcription requires waiting until a recording ends before seeing any text
• The goal of Live Transcription was to make recordings useful while they're still happening

The transcript is constantly updating itself

• Traditional transcription uploads one large audio file after a recording ends
• Live Transcription breaks audio into small segments that are continuously uploaded and transcribed during recording
• Segments slightly overlap, allowing the system to use additional context to improve accuracy
• This is what enables the transcript to self-correct and update in real time as you record

Making it feel truly "live"

• Audio segments need to be transcribed within a few hundred milliseconds to feel truly live
• The team replaced file-based communication with Unix sockets, reducing latency by roughly 150 milliseconds per segment
• The backend can reprocess audio with additional context, allowing transcripts to continuously improve and self-correct

Whisper powers the transcription

• Live Transcription is powered by OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model
• The team spent significant time balancing speed and accuracy to create the best experience possible

The infrastructure scales based on active users

• The system scales based on the number of active transcription sessions
• Server capacity automatically adjusts as demand changes

Your handwritten notes are synced with your recording

• Every ink stroke is timestamped as it's created
• During playback, Notability can recreate your note-taking process in sync with the recording
• Notes appear exactly when they were originally written

What's next?

• The team is exploring timestamp support within Live Transcription to enable features like "jump to" navigation
• They're also looking into diarization, which would identify and label different speakers automatically
• These improvements would make transcripts more searchable, organized, and useful during playback

We’d love feedback!
If you’ve used Live Transcription, we’d really appreciate hearing how it’s working for you! What’s helpful, what’s missing, or what could be better. Your feedback directly shapes what we build next 💙 Let us know in the comments!

Check out the full blog post here!

Hey everyone!

If you missed our AMA with Ryan, our Android Manager, here are the key takeaways:

• Android is still in beta and actively being built out
• The focus right now is getting the core experience stable before adding additional iOS features
• Feature parity is the goal, but it’ll take time
• Performance and reliability are top priorities
• Lots of great feature requests came in, the team is actively reviewing them
• Cross-platform (iOS, Android, Web) is a big focus moving forward

Thanks again to everyone who joined and asked questions, this was super helpful for the team.

If you didn’t get a chance to participate, feel free to keep dropping questions or feedback in the thread!

Hey everyone!

This Thursday, April 30th at 1pm (PT), our Android Manager Ryan will be here to answer all your questions.

Have ideas for Android? Curious about features or what’s coming next? Or just want to chat? This is your chance.

Drop your questions early in the thread or join us live. HERE is the link to the AMA thread, please leave your questions there!

We’re excited to hear from you 💙

We've just released a new update to Notability. In version 16.2, we've added:

• Introducing Study Timer: Stay focused with set study sessions and built-in breaks.
• Improvements to Page Manager & Page Navigator
• Enhancements for thumbnails, checklists, dark paper editing, keyboard performance, and document scan in Notability Cloud
• Improved library search performance on iOS 26

If you experience any trouble with this version, please contact our support team or let us know your feedback in the comments below!

Thanks for using Notability ✏️💙