Every Table Remembers It Differently
Three sessions ago the DM ruled that the hag's bargain covered one wish, not two. At least, that is how the DM remembers it. The warlock's player remembers something more generous, the group notes say nothing either way, and now a whole evening hinges on whose memory wins. Long campaigns collect moments like this, because human memory is a terrible archivist.
Written session notes help, but notes are summaries by nature. They flatten the bard's ten-minute speech into "Marisol convinced the wardens," and they rarely preserve the precise wording of a prophecy, a contract with a devil, or a villain's parting threat. Sometimes the exact words are the whole point, and a summary cannot give them back to you.
The usual fix, asking one player to type while everyone else plays, trades that player's fun for a record that is still incomplete. Transcription removes the tradeoff. Everyone plays, nobody scribbles, and the exact words are still there in the morning.
How D&D Session Transcription Works
There is nothing to prepare beyond inviting NotesBot to your server. After that, every session follows the same four beats:
Type /join in Your Text Channel
With the party gathered in a voice channel, anyone types /join. NotesBot enters the voice channel visibly, like any other member, and starts recording.
Run Your Session
Narrate the dungeon, roll initiative, debate that grapple ruling one more time. NotesBot keeps to the background and records what each speaker says while the game carries on.
Type /leave When You Wrap Up
The recording stops and NotesBot sends the audio through transcription with speaker labels, then through AI summarization. No exporting, no file juggling.
Your Recap Arrives in Discord
A structured recap is posted in the text channel where the command was used, and the complete word-for-word transcript is saved to your dashboard at notesbot.io.
What Your Session Record Looks Like
Here is how a session comes back to you. The transcript preserves the exact exchange, speaker by speaker, and the recap condenses the night into something the whole party will actually read.
DM: The vault door grinds open and stale air rolls out. Three headless statues face you across the chamber, and each one is holding a stone hourglass.
Marisol (Bard): I step forward and give them the full speech. Wardens of the vault, we came for the ledger, not a fight, and I am prepared to sing about whichever you choose.
Teller (Rogue): While she is talking I check the hourglasses. If the sand is moving, we are already on a timer.
NotesBotBotToday
Session 14 Recap: The Vault Under Grayharbor
📖 Story Beats
- The party opened the sealed vault beneath Grayharbor using the sigil ring recovered in session 12.
- Marisol talked the statue wardens down before combat began, and they revealed the ledger's true owner: Provost Ilene.
- Teller confirmed the hourglasses were counting down, leaving the party one hour inside the vault.
🗝️ Loot Found
- The Grayharbor ledger, naming every noble who paid the smuggling ring.
- A stone hourglass that resets the vault's timer once per day.
🧭 Next Session
- Decide whether to hand the ledger to Provost Ilene or leak it to the Tidewalkers.
- Teller wants to go back for the third hourglass before the vault reseals.
Transcript Plus Recap, Not One or the Other
Some tools give you a summary and throw away the details. Others hand you a wall of raw text and wish you luck. NotesBot generates both from the same recording, because they answer different questions. The recap answers "what happened last session?" in a minute of reading. The transcript answers "what exactly did the countess say before she vanished?" when precision is the point.
The recap is also steerable. Set a custom focus prompt with /config, something like "track promises the party makes and every named NPC," and the summary will pull those details forward. The transcript stays complete either way, no matter what the recap focuses on.
If the recap side is what interests you most, our Discord D&D bot page goes deeper on custom prompts for NPC, quest, and loot tracking.
What Every Session Leaves Behind
Word-for-Word Transcripts
Every session produces a complete transcript of what was actually said, not a paraphrase. Pull the exact wording of a ruling, a bargain, or a dying villain's last line.
Speaker Labels
Each line is attributed to the person who said it, so DM narration, player dialogue, and table chatter stay untangled when you read the record back.
AI Recap Included
Alongside the transcript, NotesBot posts a structured recap in your Discord channel, so players who only skim still know where the story stands.
D&D Mode for Long Sessions
Switch to D&D Mode in /config and each session can run 5 continuous hours, with a recap written for campaigns: story beats, NPCs, loot, and next hooks.
Session Archive
Recordings, transcripts, and recaps are stored in your dashboard at notesbot.io. Session 3 is as easy to revisit as last week's game.
100+ Languages
Tables that play in Spanish, German, Portuguese, or Japanese get transcripts in their own language. NotesBot supports more than 100 languages.
Speaker Labels: Who Said What at the Table
A transcript without names is a riddle. NotesBot labels every line with its speaker, so the record reads like a script: the DM describing the vault, the rogue muttering about the timer, the bard committing the party to something ambitious. When a player says "I never agreed to that," the script settles it kindly and quickly.
Labels also make the transcript quotable. Lift the paladin's oath word for word for your campaign journal, or reread the table's reaction to the big reveal purely to enjoy it a second time.
Under the hood this is the same voice to text pipeline NotesBot uses for meetings, adapted to the table by DnD Mode. And it is not only for fifth edition. If your group plays Pathfinder or Blades in the Dark, or records an actual play show, see RPG session transcription.
Frequently Asked Questions
How accurate is the transcript when the whole table talks at once?
Crosstalk is the hardest thing any transcription setup deals with, and D&D tables produce plenty of it. NotesBot handles it by listening to each person in the voice channel separately rather than recording one mixed feed, so a cheer over a natural 20 does not erase the DM's sentence underneath it. Quick interjections and overlapping reactions come through attributed to the right speaker. No settings are needed for that; it is how the bot captures audio in every mode.
How do speaker labels work in the transcript?
Every line of the transcript is attributed to the person who said it. DM narration, in-character dialogue, and out-of-character table talk all stay separated by speaker, so when you read the transcript weeks later you can tell exactly who promised the duke what. It also makes quoting simple: copy the line, name and all, into your campaign journal.
Where do my session transcripts live?
The AI recap is posted in the Discord text channel where the command was typed, so the whole party sees it right away. The full word-for-word transcript, along with the recording and the recap, is stored in your NotesBot dashboard at notesbot.io. Sign in with Discord and every session you have recorded is waiting there.
Can I look something up from a session we played months ago?
Yes. Every recorded session is archived in your dashboard, so you can open any past transcript and search it for a name, an item, or a ruling. This is where transcription earns its keep: three months later, when someone insists the hag's bargain covered two wishes, you can pull up the exact exchange and read it back to the table.
What is the difference between the transcript and the recap?
They come from the same recording but do different jobs. The transcript is the verbatim record: every line, labeled by speaker, for the moments when exact wording matters. The recap is a short AI-written summary posted in Discord, organized under clear headers, for the player who missed the session and wants the highlights. NotesBot produces both every time, and a custom prompt set with /config steers what the recap pulls forward.