Upload a recording

Have a call you recorded somewhere else — a Zoom export, a voice memo from your phone, a dictaphone file, the video of a workshop? Upload it, and Jinn treats it the way it treats a meeting from the desktop app: it writes the transcript, and the project’s agents read it. Uploading happens in the browser, on any computer. You don’t need the desktop app for it.

Upload a file

Three places start an upload. They all end the same way — on the project’s Recordings tab, with your files uploading — so pick whichever is nearest.

From any page

Click Add → Upload in the left sidebar. Choose the project the meeting belongs to, then Meeting recording in the Import window, and pick the files.

• Always one click away. Add sits in the sidebar on every screen, so you don’t have to leave the doc or the chat you’re in.
• A new project on the way. If the meeting starts something new, Create new project in the project list makes it and carries on with the upload.

The same window opens from + on Home → Files, and from a project’s ⋯ → Import, where the project is already chosen.

From the Recordings page

Open Home → Recordings and click +. Choose the project, and the file picker opens.

• Every meeting in one list. The tab holds the recordings of every project you can open, so you add a meeting next to the others without going looking for its project first.

From a project

Open Projects → a project → Recordings, and drag your files onto the tab — or click Upload recordings and pick them.

• Drag and drop. This is the only place you can drag files onto from your desktop or a folder window. While you drag, the tab confirms where they’re going: Drop to add 3 recordings to and the project’s name.
• Nothing to choose. You’re already in the project, so the files go straight in.
• Always on offer. On a project with no recordings yet, the whole tab is a drop area. Once it has some, a strip under the list keeps the same offer. Close the strip with its × if you don’t need the reminder; it stays closed in this browser for 30 days, and dropping files on the tab works either way.

Whichever way you upload, you can pick several files at once and each becomes its own meeting. Every upload lands in a project, so there’s no inbox step afterwards, the way there is for a recording made without picking one.

Follow an upload

Each file gets its own row at the top of the list as soon as you drop it, titled with the file’s name. The row shows where the file is:

• Waiting to upload — Jinn sends two files at a time; the rest wait their turn.
• Uploading — how much has gone up so far, for example 46 MB of 72 MB.
• Processing… — the file is in, and Jinn is creating the meeting.

A video has two more steps before that, on the same bar: Checking file, then Waiting to extract audio and Extracting audio with a percentage. Jinn takes the audio out of one video at a time. The red × on a row cancels it, at any of these steps. The row goes at once, nothing is kept, and nothing asks you to confirm. You can carry on working anywhere in Jinn while files upload. Closing or reloading the browser tab is what stops them: an upload that hasn’t finished is cancelled, and no meeting is made from it. Jinn warns you before the tab closes.

What happens next

From here on, an uploaded file is a meeting like any other. Jinn transcribes it, the project’s Default agent reads the transcript as soon as it’s ready, and every other agent on the project writes its write-up when you ask. Its row in the list shows how far the transcript has got. If transcription fails, the meeting says Transcription failed and why, with Try again, the same as a recording made in the app — see what each reason means. A few things are particular to uploads:

• The title is the file’s name, without its extension. Rename the meeting once you know what to call it.
• The date is when you uploaded it, not when the meeting happened. Jinn has no way to read that from the file.
• The icon says where it came from: a microphone for uploaded audio, a video camera for an uploaded video, and a sound wave for a meeting recorded in the desktop app. You can change it like any other icon.
• The length shows in the list whenever your browser can read it from the file. An AIFF file in Chrome is the usual exception; it’s transcribed all the same.

To take the audio back out — of an upload or of any recording — click Download recording on the player, or choose it from the recording’s ⋯ menu in a list or at the top of its page. For a video, what you get is the audio Jinn took from it, not the video.

Formats and size limits

There’s no cap on length, only on size. 100 MB of audio holds a long meeting in most formats. A video never leaves your computer whole. Jinn takes the soundtrack out in the browser and uploads only that, so an hour-long screen recording of several gigabytes goes up as a file a fraction of its size. If the video has more than one audio track, Jinn uses the one the file marks as the main one. Some videos keep their sound in a form that has to be converted first. Chrome and the Jinn desktop app can do that; other browsers may not, and Jinn says so by name for that file rather than uploading something it can’t read.

When a file is refused

Jinn checks every file before it starts and refuses the ones it can’t use, naming each file and the reason. The rest of the batch carries on. A file can also fail partway, after Jinn has accepted it. Its row says Couldn’t upload this file and why — the connection dropped, you were signed out, the workspace is out of storage, or the file is larger than the server accepts. Click Retry once the cause is sorted, or Remove to clear the row.

Where to go next