Live Transcription

Live Transcription writes down a conversation as it happens: your microphone and whatever this device is playing. It’s for the calls and conversations that aren’t a Teams meeting — a phone call on speaker, a room, a video call in an app Pia can’t join.

Everything runs on your machine. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Note

Want Pia to join a Microsoft Teams meeting as a silent attendee instead? That’s Meeting Transcription.

Starting a Session

1. Open the Assistant and click the live transcription button in the message bar (tooltip: Live transcription with consent)
2. Read the Before you start screen
3. Tick I have informed everyone present and I’m ready to start
4. Click Start

Pia then shows Preparing…, Starting…, and finally Listening….

Use Stop to pause and Resume to pick up again in the same session.

The Consent Gate

This is the part worth understanding, because it changes what actually ends up in the transcript.

Your microphone side is transcribed from the start. Everyone speaking into your microphone appears as me — Pia doesn’t try to tell them apart.

The other side — anything coming out of your speakers — is not transcribed until that person says a consent sentence naming Pia. Until then their speech is only checked for that sentence and then thrown away. It’s never written down.

The sentence to say is:

My name is [Name] and I accept this recording by Pia.

German and French work too:

Mein Name ist [Name] und ich akzeptiere diese Aufzeichnung durch Pia.

Je m’appelle [Nom] et j’accepte cet enregistrement par Pia.

These are shorter than the wording earlier versions asked for, and the German one has lost its comma — the old phrasing invited a pause in the middle, which split it into two utterances and got it refused. The older wording still works if somebody says it.

Getting the sentence to the other side

Each sentence has a Copy this sentence button, and the one in your language stays at the top of the transcription window for the whole session. Paste it into the meeting chat: that is the only way somebody joining over system audio gets to read it.

A chime confirms each accepted sentence. You hear it; the far end does not.

A refused sentence records which of the four required parts was missing — the part only, never anything anyone said.

Each voice on the other side gets a chip showing where it stands:

Chip	What it means
awaiting consent	Heard, but nothing is being transcribed.
consented	The sentence was recognised — this voice is now being written down.
revoked	Consent was withdrawn. Transcription stops again.

Right-click a speaker to Rename speaker or Revoke consent.

Two limits to know

• Overlapping speech (cross-talk) can occasionally be attributed to the wrong speaker.
• Very short remarks — under about 1.5 seconds — are dropped and never transcribed, consented or not.

Speaking Time

Click the statistics button in the header for Speaking time — how much of the conversation each speaker has taken. Handy for interviews and one-to-ones.

Saving

When you’re done, you have three options:

• Save — write the transcript to a Markdown (.md) file wherever you like.
• Save to vault… — file it in your Memory vault with a title, attendees, tags, project and notes, so Pia can recall it later in chat. See Documents & Auto-Ingest.
• Save & Summarize — save it and hand it straight to the Assistant for a summary.

Nothing is saved automatically. Close the panel without saving and the transcript is gone.

Privacy

• Everything is transcribed locally. No audio and no text leave your device — unless you choose Save & Summarize, which sends the transcript to your AI provider like any other message.
• Non-consented speech is never written down. It’s checked for the consent sentence and discarded.
• Voice fingerprints live in memory only for the session and are wiped afterwards.
• A record of each consent is kept so you can show one was given — the sentence, the name, the time — stored under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Pia\ConsentEvidence and protected by Windows. A later revocation is recorded beside the grant, never over it.
• That record is kept for 14 days and then deleted, folder and all. Pia clears what is due every time it starts, and once a day while it runs.
• Transcript text and speaker names stay out of Pia’s log files.

How this differs from a meeting

The consent gate only works if Pia can tell voices apart, so a few of your meeting settings are deliberately overridden here:

• Speaker separation is mandatory. A meeting degrades gracefully if the speaker model can’t be downloaded; a live-transcription session won’t start at all, because “one anonymous speaker” would mean nobody’s consent could be tracked.
• Smart speaker detection is off, whatever your meeting setting says. It corrects earlier speaker assignments as it goes, and under a consent gate that could retroactively hand a consented label to someone who never consented.
• Your speaker limit is ignored. At a cap, Pia would be forced to fold a new voice into an existing speaker — and that voice could inherit a consent it never gave. Over-splitting one person into two is the safer failure, so that’s what happens instead.

Your speaker matching sensitivity setting still applies.

See the Privacy guide for how Pia handles your data across the app.

Next Steps

• Meeting Transcription — have Pia join a Teams meeting instead
• Speech (STT & TTS) — the speech-to-text engine this uses