Record Hybrid Meetings Using Sembly

Hybrid meetings allow remote teams and in-office teams to join the call together using either personal (for remote attendees) or generic (for those in the same room) audio input devices. This creates a mixed environment, making it more challenging to capture everything clearly than in a purely online or purely offline meeting.

Sembly supports hybrid meetings through a combination of its meeting agent and audio recording features. Before recording a real meeting, we suggest running a test to see which option suits you the best.

You can record hybrid meetings using one of the following methods.

Option 1 — Invite the Sembly Agent to the Conference Call

You can follow a standard online call-recording practice in case most of the attendees are online. This ensures clear recording for all participants regardless of their location. The quality of the recording is crucial here, as it affects transcription and speaker recognition. For the best experience, we recommend using high-quality microphones for an in-office team.

✅ Recommended setup:

1. Create your online meeting as usual in Microsoft Teams / Zoom / Google Meet / Webex.

2. Add all participants - remote and in-office - to the invite.

3. In the physical meeting room, set up a shared microphone connected to the laptop of the person who will also join the online meeting. This ensures that voices from the room are captured clearly.

4. Log in to your Sembly account and make sure the Sembly agent is invited to a call using one of the following methods: via a connected calendar, by email, via instant invite, or through the Chrome extension.

5. Sembly will join and record both the online and in-room conversations. After a meeting has been processed and has the Completed status, you can review and manage it.

❗️Important notes:

• Participants speaking from the same shared meeting platform account (e.g., a meeting room setup) will appear under a single speaker label because of how speaker recognition works. If it's crucial to distinguish in-person speakers in the transcription, you can manually split the dialogue and assign the correct users.

• Make sure that the microphone is placed centrally so that all in-room participants are equally audible.

• Avoid connecting multiple laptops in the same room with active microphones — this causes echo and distorts the recording.

• If all in-room participants join the online call using their individual accounts, with their microphones muted but sharing one microphone for speaking, Sembly will still capture the discussion properly as long as the mic quality is good.

Option 2 — Use the Sembly Mobile App

If you prefer not to invite the agent and most attendees are offline in a room, we recommend using the Sembly mobile app on your phone. You can also connect your phone to a conference microphone for better audio quality in large rooms. Speakers with Sembly accounts and Voice ID recorded will be recognized by name in the transcription. 

✅ Recommended setup:

1. Install the Sembly mobile app, log in to your Sembly account.

2.  Put your mobile device in the center of the meeting room.

3. Make sure the microphone captures both in-room discussions and voices from the online meeting.

4. Start the recording directly in the mobile app.

5. For long meetings, occasionally check that the recording remains active.

6. When a meeting is finished, save a recording and upload it to My Meetings. Review notes, tasks and other items in the web app on your laptop.

💎 Pro tips for best results:

• Using a separate recording device, e.g., a phone running Sembly, ensures stable recording. You can also use the Offline Audio Recorder on a laptop as an alternative to a mobile device. In this case, two laptops should be available; one you can use as a display for the online call, and another exclusively for Sembly recording.

• Always ensure your online participants are audible in the room, as Sembly needs to “hear” both sides of the conversation to produce complete transcripts.

• Make sure you connect only one mic to one device in the room. Two external microphones running simultaneously in the room (one for the online meeting platform, the other for your phone) may pick up each other’s audio. This will create a terrible echo and feedback for people online.

⚠️ Common mistakes to avoid:

• Recording on a laptop while switching between browser tabs disrupts audio capture.

• Don't use only one laptop to catch the voices of offline and online attendees. No recording will occur if one browser tab is open with the Sembly Audio Recorder and another tab is open with an online meeting.

• Forgetting to verify that the Sembly page remains active and “live” during recording on a laptop.

Option 3 — Upload a Pre-Recorded File

If you have already recorded a meeting on a platform (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet) and/or on a dictaphone, you can then upload pre-recorded audio or video files to your Sembly account.  

Just click + New Meeting → Upload audio file, drag the file in, and Sembly will process it. After you can review notes, key items, and tasks.

To improve the voice recording, we suggest reviewing these articles about transcription accuracy and speaker identification.