When a Recording Does Not Produce Intelligence
What to check, in the order that matters.
One thing here is urgent and the rest can wait.
If you are reading this with a recording still on your phone and an upload that failed, do not close the page. Move somewhere with better signal and try the upload again. The recording lives in the app's memory, and closing the page discards it.
Everything else — a transcript that did not arrive, a missing record button, a meeting stuck on processing — is recoverable at your leisure.
Troubleshooting Guide
Is the recording still on your phone with the page open?
Is there a "Process it again" button on the meeting in the app?
Was there no record button on the meeting at all?
Is the meeting missing from the mobile list entirely?
Is there a transcript but no summary or debrief?
Did processing fail more than once on the same recording?
Known Issues
There is no Start Recording button on the meeting
The calendar entry never became a meeting, because nobody else is involved in it.
Attach the contact you are meeting to the calendar entry, or invite them as a guest. The entry becomes a meeting when you save, and the record button appears.
You can do this from your phone in the moment, but it is much better done when you book. An entry with only you on it is never recordable.
The upload failed and I still have the recording
Usually signal. Sometimes the file is over the limit.
Do not close the page. The recording is in the app's memory and closing the page loses it.
Move somewhere with better signal and retry. If the message names a size over 60 MB, the upload was refused before anything was sent — your recording is intact, but it is too big for one upload. Use the share or download option to get a copy off the phone, then upload it through the Retrospective route where you can work with the file directly.
The meeting has been processing for a long time
Transcription did not complete.
Open the meeting in the app. After about ten minutes it offers Process it again, which re-submits the recording Zyntro already holds — nothing is needed from your phone.
If the button is not there, there is no stored recording, which means the upload never finished.
The recording uploaded but the transcript is unusable
The phone could not hear the conversation properly.
Play the recording back and listen. If you cannot follow it, neither can anything else.
For next time: phone face up in the middle of the table, not in a pocket or a bag. For this time, paste your own notes as a transcript — a summary built from your recollection is better than one built from a muffle.
The speakers in the transcript are run together or mislabelled
The meeting's attendees were not recorded, so Zyntro did not know how many voices to separate.
Add the attendees to the meeting, then re-process. Zyntro works out how many voices to separate from the attendee count, so a four-person meeting recorded with no attendees gets noticeably worse separation than one with all four listed.
This is the single cheapest improvement to transcript quality and it takes under a minute.
A video link was rejected or produced nothing
The link is not reachable without being signed in.
A Google Drive link has to be shared so that anyone with the link can view it. A link that works for you because you are signed in cannot be downloaded by Zyntro.
Change the sharing on the file and submit it again, or download the video and upload the audio instead.
The attendees received a summary of a meeting from weeks ago
The attendee summary was not suppressed when the old meeting was processed.
On the recovery panel of an existing meeting, Suppress attendee notifications is on by default for exactly this reason. On the Retrospective screen it is off, because a meeting you are recording now should behave like any other.
When you are processing anything older than a day or two, check that toggle before submitting.
The recording was lost when the phone locked
The screen slept and recording stopped, or the page was discarded.
The app asks the phone to stay awake while recording, but an iPhone does not always honour that. Set Settings → Display & Brightness → Auto-Lock → Never before a meeting that matters.
Leave the recording screen in front, do not switch apps, and lay the phone face up rather than putting it away.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not as a file by default. It is held in the app while you are on the recording screen. You can use the share or download option to keep your own copy before uploading, which is worth doing for a meeting that really matters.
Not in the app — it records against a meeting. Use your phone's own voice recorder, then create the meeting through Retrospective and upload the file.
The limit is on size rather than time: 60 MB per upload, which is well over an hour of speech in a compressed format. A very long session is better split, or recorded with your phone's own recorder and uploaded as a file.
Yes. The charge is made when the transcription work is submitted, not when it succeeds. That is why listening to a recording before uploading it is worth the time — a second attempt on an inaudible recording costs the same as the first.
Yes, at the same rate as the original audio processing, because the work is being done again.
The mobile app shows only meetings where you are the organiser or an attendee. The desktop list at CRM → Meetings shows the whole organisation. If you need to record a colleague's meeting, get yourself added to it as an attendee.
Important: The one habit worth building: upload before you leave the room. Every unrecoverable case in this article comes from the same window — the gap between stopping the recording and finishing the upload. Close that gap and nothing here can cost you a conversation.
