Voice notes

Basecamp 5 records voice notes with its built-in mic, but they stay audio-only. Assistant adds the other half: a better player, and one-click transcription that the whole team shares.

Transcribing a note

1. Open any voice note in Basecamp: in a message, a comment, a Campfire, or a Ping.
2. Assistant replaces the stock audio card with its own player. Click Transcribe under the note.
3. A typical note takes a few seconds. The transcript is posted as a comment right under the note, marked “Transcript (auto)”, with a one-line summary and a list of action items on longer notes.

Any voice note works: yours, a teammate’s, or one recorded months before you installed Assistant. The language is detected automatically, and a note that mixes languages comes back as a single transcript.

Who sees a transcript

Everyone, the same way. The transcript comment is a normal Basecamp comment, so the whole team reads the exact same thing whether they have Assistant or not, in the browser or the mobile apps, and Basecamp’s own search can find what was said. The comment is posted under the name of whoever clicked Transcribe, and each note only counts against your workspace’s minutes once: after that, nobody sees a Transcribe button on it again.

The exception is Campfires and Pings: chats have no comments, so those transcripts show inside Assistant’s player instead, visible to teammates with Assistant.

Editing a transcript

Names, product terms, and codenames are the usual suspects for mis-hearing. On message and to-do threads, the transcript is your comment: edit it like any Basecamp comment. For Campfire and Ping notes, click Edit under the transcript in the player; the summary and action items are regenerated from your corrected text.

The player

• Waveform scrubbing: click anywhere on the waveform to jump.
• Speed: cycle 1× / 1.5× / 2×. Your choice is remembered.
• Resume: leave a note halfway and it continues from where you stopped.
• Unheard dot: notes you haven’t finished carry a blue dot.
• Auto-advance: when a note ends, the next note in the thread plays.
• Download: the original file is always one click away.

Limits

• Every workspace includes 6,000 transcription minutes per month (that’s 100 hours). The meter lives in Assistant → Usage. When it runs out, playback keeps working and transcripts resume on the 1st.
• Notes up to 10 MB can be transcribed. Longer recordings than that are rare for voice notes, but they’ll be declined with a clear message.

Privacy

The audio is read only for the seconds transcription takes and is never stored on our servers. We keep the transcript text, its summary, and action items, under the same per-project access rules as Basecamp itself: if someone can’t open the project, they can’t read its transcripts. Details in the privacy policy.

Turning it off

Assistant → Usage has an on/off switch for the whole voice notes feature. Off means Basecamp’s stock audio cards come back and nothing is transcribed.