The Best Moments at Your Table Vanish First
A scene lands perfectly. The GM improvises a villain monologue that silences the table, a player answers with exactly the right line, and everyone agrees it was the moment of the campaign. Three weeks later, nobody can quote it. The recap thread says "the confrontation with Veska went hard" and the actual words are gone.
For actual-play creators the loss is more expensive. Writing show notes means scrubbing back through hours of raw audio to find one exchange for the episode description. Building subtitles means transcribing by hand or paying for it. Even a simple "what happened last episode" summary eats an evening that could have gone into prep or editing.
And for the table itself, a written record matters beyond nostalgia. Players who process text more easily than fast audio can reread the session at their own pace. Rules disputes get settled by checking what the GM actually said. A word-for-word transcript turns your sessions from something you half remember into something you can look up.
How RPG Session Transcription Works
There is no hardware, no separate recording software, and no one at the table assigned to scribe duty. The whole flow is two slash commands:
Type /join When Everyone Is in the Channel
NotesBot enters your voice channel visibly, like any other member, and starts recording. Each person is captured as a separate speaker from the first word, so the transcript knows your GM from your rogue.
Run the Session You Were Going to Run Anyway
Nothing about how you play needs to change. Because each speaker is captured separately, a table talking over itself still comes through clearly. For sessions longer than 2.5 hours, switch to D&D Mode in /config to record up to 5 continuous hours.
Type /leave When the Session Wraps
NotesBot stops recording and starts processing: the audio becomes a word-for-word transcript with speaker labels, and the AI builds a structured recap from it.
The Recap Posts in Your Text Channel
Minutes later, the recap appears in the channel your server sends notes to, ready for the party or your audience. By default the notes arrive in a thread under the text channel they post in rather than as loose messages, and /config switches that to plain messages. The transcript comes with it as a timestamped .txt file in Discord, and the whole call is archived on your dashboard at notesbot.io.
What the Transcript and Recap Look Like
Every session produces two things: the verbatim transcript, excerpted at the top here, and the recap NotesBot posts back to your channel, shown below it.
GM: The vault door swings wide, and somewhere above you a bell starts ringing. You have maybe a minute.
Priya: I grab the ledger. Just the ledger, leave the coin. Wren, kill the lanterns.
Wren: Lanterns are out. Everyone hold your breath and count to ten with me.
NotesBotBotToday
Episode 14 Recap: The Silver Vault Job
🎬 Episode Highlights
- The crew cracked the Silver Vault using the forged customs seal from episode 11
- Priya took the Dunmore ledger and left the coin, betting the names inside are worth more
- Wren's lantern blackout bought the crew a clean exit before the watch arrived
🧭 Where the Story Stands
- The Dunmore family knows someone has the ledger, but not who
- Marlow expects his cut by week's end, and the crew has not agreed on a number
🎙️ Clip-Worthy Moments
- Priya's whispered line at the vault door, quoted in full in the transcript
- The dead silence when the bell started, then the whole table talking at once
For Actual-Play Creators
If your table streams or publishes its sessions, the transcript does the tedious half of post-production. Episode summaries start from the recap instead of a blank page. Pull quotes for the episode description come straight from the transcript, worded exactly as they were said, with the speaker already labeled.
The same text works as source material for subtitles. Instead of transcribing hours of audio by hand, you paste the word-for-word record into your captioning workflow and spend your time on edits, not typing. That makes your show readable for deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners and for anyone following along in a loud room.
You can also steer what the recap surfaces. Set a custom focus prompt with /config such as "Summarize like an episode description and call out memorable in-character quotes" and the recap starts reading like show notes. You do not have to start from a blank box. /config offers a built-in D&D and TTRPG template as a starting point, which is the fastest way to a usable recap, and you can edit it from there. Settings come from whoever's plan pays for the recording, so at a table on a shared plan the account holder sets the prompt for everyone. Underneath it all, the voice recording engine captures each speaker separately, which is what keeps a five-person party legible on the page.
Built for Tables That Want the Full Record
Word-for-Word Transcripts
The complete text of your session, from the opening recap to the last out-of-character joke. Quote the villain speech exactly, or check what the GM really ruled.
Speaker Labels for the Whole Party
Every voice in the channel is recorded separately, so the transcript reads like a script. No guessing whether that line was the GM or the bard's player.
Episode-Style Recaps
A structured summary with emoji section headers, posted in your Discord text channel minutes after the session ends. Your recap thread writes itself.
Custom Focus Prompts
Tell the AI what your game cares about through /config: clues and sanity events, heat and faction standing, or quotable moments for the show notes. On a shared plan, settings come from whoever's plan pays for the recording.
A Searchable Session Archive
Recordings, transcripts, and recaps for every session live in your dashboard at notesbot.io. Find what the fixer promised in session 3 without relistening.
80+ Languages
Tables playing in Spanish, French, Japanese, or nearly any other language get the same transcripts and recaps. The spoken language is detected automatically, with nothing to configure.
For Every Table, Whatever You Play
Transcription does not care about your ruleset. Whether the table is running Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, Shadowrun, or a homebrew system nobody outside your server has heard of, NotesBot records the conversation happening in the voice channel and turns it into text. There is nothing to configure per system unless you want the recap tuned, and then it is one prompt.
Over a long campaign, the archive becomes the table's shared memory. What did the patron actually agree to pay? Which door did the party leave unopened in the undercity? Who swore the oath, and in what words? Instead of a debate, it is a search through past sessions in the dashboard.
If your group runs D&D specifically, the D&D session transcription page digs into that use case, and the Discord RPG bot page has per-system prompt examples, from sanity tracking to faction standing.
Record Two Tables at Once
A show that runs a main table and a side campaign, or a server with several groups playing the same evening, does not have to record them one at a time.
NotesBot itself records one call at a time. Each assistant bot you invite to the server adds one more, up to 7. The assistants join the voice channel and record; they never post, so the notes always come back from NotesBot in the channel you expect.
Every call running at the same time draws on the same hour balance, so two recordings for an hour spend two hours. Invite as many or as few as you need:
The invite asks for View Channel and Connect, the two permissions that matter, and never Speak. More on recording several calls at once.
For Servers With More Than One Table
Once several groups share a server, two things need setting: whose plan pays for the recordings, and which channel each table's transcript and recap post in. An admin sets both from /setup in Discord.
One plan covers the server
One plan can cover the whole server. An admin opens /setup, goes to Team & billing, names the account holder and an optional role, and the account holder accepts by DM unless they set it up themselves. Leave the role empty and only the account holder can record.
Nothing is billed until the account holder says yes, and ending it later leaves their own plan and hours untouched. How team billing works.
Notes land where you want them
An admin can send every call to one channel from /setup, under Where notes go, and give a single voice channel or a whole category a place of its own.
The closest match wins, so a voice channel beats its category, and Preview shows you the answer before a single call is recorded. Where notes go.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I copy my transcripts to use for show notes or captions?
Yes, and you do not have to leave Discord to get it. The transcript arrives as a timestamped .txt file attached in the channel on every session, so you can download it straight from there. By default the notes arrive in a thread under the text channel they post in rather than as loose messages, and /config switches that to plain messages. The same transcript is also archived in your dashboard at notesbot.io alongside the recording and the AI recap. Either copy is plain text with speaker labels, so it drops into a script document or a captioning workflow.
How long of a session can NotesBot record?
Tabletop sessions run long, and NotesBot is built for that. Paid plans run from $3 to $40 per month, 5 to 100 hours of recording. There is also Annual at $96 a year: 240 hours for the year, granted up front. Hours reset each cycle and do not roll over. A weekly four-hour game fits comfortably on a mid-sized plan and an actual-play production schedule fits on a larger one. A single session runs up to 2.5 hours, or 5 hours in D&D Mode. Each Discord account gets a one-time 30-minute free trial with no credit card, and it does not renew.
Does the transcript show who said what with a full party in the call?
Yes. NotesBot records each person in the voice channel as a separate speaker, so the transcript reads like a script: the GM's narration, each player's table talk, and in-character dialogue are all labeled by speaker. Because every voice is captured on its own rather than in one mixed feed, tables that talk over each other still come through, with crosstalk attributed instead of dropped.
Can NotesBot transcribe games played in languages other than English?
Yes. NotesBot supports transcription in 80+ languages, so a table playing in Spanish, German, Portuguese, or Japanese gets the same word-for-word transcript and AI recap as an English-speaking group. The spoken language is detected automatically on every call, so run each game in whichever language fits your group and there is nothing to set.
Is this only for D&D, or does it work for other systems?
NotesBot is system-agnostic. It records the conversation in your voice channel, so Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, Shadowrun, and fully homebrew systems all work the same way. The custom focus prompt set through /config is how you tune the recap to your game, for example asking it to track clues and sanity events, or faction standing and heat. You do not have to start from a blank box. /config offers a built-in D&D and TTRPG template as a starting point, which is the fastest way to a usable recap, and you can edit it from there. Because settings come from whoever's plan pays for the recording, at a table on a shared plan it is the account holder who sets it. Creators get the identical transcript output no matter which system their show runs.
Each Discord account gets a one-time 30-minute free trial with no credit card, and it does not renew. Trials are also capped per server: three people and an hour and a half of trial time in total, and a server covered by team billing skips trials altogether. Paid plans run from $3 to $40 per month, 5 to 100 hours of recording. There is also Annual at $96 a year: 240 hours for the year, granted up front. Hours reset each cycle and do not roll over. See every plan.