# What does the notetaker do with a meeting it could not hear properly?

> For anyone whose Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call had bad audio — a weak connection, a speakerphone in a busy room, people talking over each other — and who wants to know what TrackHeros does with it: the warning shown instead of an invented summary, the two other messages you may see, what you can still use, and how to avoid it next time.

Canonical: https://trackheros.com/answers/meeting-the-notetaker-could-not-hear/  
Author: Sami Kanafani  
Updated: 2026-10-22

**In short:** TrackHeros says so instead of inventing a summary. When the transcript of a Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call is too garbled to summarise, the meeting page shows an amber notice, “This transcript could not be read reliably.”, gives the reason and tells you to treat anything below as unverified and check the recording. The recording and transcript stay available.

| Fact | Detail |
| --- | --- |
| Garbled transcript | “This transcript could not be read reliably.”, with the reason |
| Very short meeting | “This meeting was too short to write minutes for.” |
| Silence | “No speech was recorded in this meeting.” |
| Transcribing again | Not available; the recording is the reference |

When the audio of a meeting is too poor to transcribe reliably, TrackHeros tells you so on the meeting page rather than writing a confident summary of a meeting it did not hear. This answer is for freelancers and consultants whose Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call had bad sound, and who want to know what they will find afterwards and what they can still do with it. The rest of what a summary contains is on [meeting minutes](/features/meeting-minutes/).

## What does the meeting page show?

An amber notice at the top of the summary: "This transcript could not be read reliably." Then the reason, and then the advice: "Treat anything below as unverified, and check the recording." When no specific reason is given, it reads "The speech-to-text output was not coherent enough to summarise."

Before writing anything, the summariser judges whether the transcript is coherent: whether replies answer what came before them, whether names and topics hold from one line to the next. A broken transcript often reads fluently and means nothing, which is exactly the kind of text that produces a plausible, invented meeting. When it fails that test, the summary says so.

## Are there other messages for a meeting with nothing to summarise?

Two, and they mean different things:

| Message                                            | What it means                                                                                                                              |
| -------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| "This meeting was too short to write minutes for." | Something was said, but not enough for minutes. The transcript is kept and can be read in the Transcript tab                               |
| "No speech was recorded in this meeting."          | There was nothing to write minutes from. The page adds: "If people did talk, check that the notetaker was let in and could hear the call." |
| "This transcript could not be read reliably."      | There was speech, but the transcript of it is not coherent enough to trust                                                                 |

"No speech" points at where the bot was rather than at the sound quality: a call nobody spoke in, for example one everyone else left for a different link. A bot that was never admitted shows "Not let in" instead.

## What makes a transcript unreadable?

Usually the sound that reached the call, not the notetaker. The common causes:

- **A weak connection** that turns one person's voice robotic or cuts it into fragments, for everyone in the call.
- **A speakerphone in a large or busy room**, where voices arrive faint and mixed with echo and noise.
- **Constant crosstalk**, with several people talking over each other for long stretches.
- **Music, hold tones or a shared video** playing over the conversation.
- **The wrong language**, when captions were decoded in one language and the meeting was held in another. TrackHeros is built to send doubtful meetings to a full pass over the recording; [what happens when it gets the language wrong](/answers/notetaker-detects-the-wrong-language/) covers that case.

## What can I still use from that meeting?

The recording, first. It plays inside the app, on the meeting page, and it is the reference for anything you need to know. The transcript is kept too; read it as a set of clues rather than a record, and note that any line that could not be attributed reads "Unknown" ([why that happens](/answers/unknown-speaker-in-the-transcript/)).

Rewriting the notes will not help here. "Summarise as an interview" or "Summarise as a project meeting", and rewriting the notes in another language, all write from the same transcript, and there is no button to transcribe a meeting again. For a call that matters, write the few lines the client needs from the recording yourself.

## How do I avoid it next time?

Fix the sound at the source, because every notetaker hears the call the way the participants do.

1. Ask people to use a headset, or at least to mute when they are not speaking.
2. In a meeting room, use the room's microphone system rather than a laptop at the end of the table.
3. Turn off background music and shared video audio while people are talking.
4. Make sure the bot is admitted at the start; a bot let in late hears only the end.
5. If someone's audio breaks up, say so in the call and ask them to repeat the important part. [Why transcripts get speakers wrong](/blog/why-transcripts-get-speakers-wrong/) has more habits that help both the words and the names.

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