Every student knows the trade. The lecturer says something worth keeping, you put your head down to write it, and while you are writing, three more sentences go past. You look up somewhere in the middle of the fourth. The thing you wrote down is safe. The thing that explained it is gone.

Note-taking is really two jobs — listening and recording — and a person can only do one of them well at a time.

Save notes takes the recording job.

What it does

Turn it on and yTranslate keeps a written record of the session on your phone, written as the session happens rather than saved at the end. While it is on, a small amber dot at the top of the room tells you it is saving. Afterwards you open the note, read it, and share it as a PDF: print it, mark it up, or drop it into whatever you revise from.

What is in it is exactly what appeared on your screen — every message, one after another, the same way you saw them come up in the room. Open a note and you are looking at the session again. Export it and each message carries the time it was said, so you can find the ten minutes you need instead of reading an hour.

Two more things about that record are worth stating plainly, because they are what make it usable at a university.

It is text, not audio. You can search it, skim it, copy a definition out of it, and hand three pages to a study group.

And it is kept on your phone. Notes are written to the device and are never uploaded to our servers, so we cannot read them. The live session itself works as any room does, with the words passing through our service to reach the screen; it is the saved record that stays with you. If your iPhone backs up to iCloud, your notes are part of that backup like the rest of your apps’ data. In Settings you can see exactly how much space they take — “1 session · 177 KB”, for example — and you can delete them whenever you like.

Turning it on

  1. Open Settings.

    Tap the gear icon at the top right of the Home screen. Under Notes, switch on Save notes on this device. That is the whole setup, and it applies whether you are speaking or listening.

  2. Check the language you read in.

    On the same screen, under General, Your language is “the language you read in: the app itself, and the translations you receive in a room.”

  3. Find it afterwards.

    Tap Saved notes, just below the switch. Every session is in the list. Tap one to read it, or tap Share to export it as a PDF.

That is it. There is no separate record button to remember at the start of a lecture and forget at the end.

Three ways a student actually uses this

Joining the lecturer’s room

If your department runs a room, open the Listener tab, type the code, and read along in your own language. Listening is free and needs no account, and with Save notes on, that session is saved to your phone like any other.

Your own phone, same language

Open the Speaker tab, set Speaking language to English, tap Create Room, and put the phone where it can hear the lecturer. Nobody has to join. The room shows what is said either way, so an English lecture read in English simply gives you the transcript — a record of the hour, saved as a note.

Your own phone, your own language

This is the one people do not expect. Set Speaking language to the language being spoken — say Español — while Your language stays English. A switch appears on the Home screen: Also show translations in your language (English). Turn it on, and one phone gives you the lecture and your own reading of it on the same screen, and the note keeps both lines, exactly as they appeared. Nobody else is in the room. The translation is happening for you alone.

For an international student, that last one is the difference between a module you survive and a module you can revise.

The last two use your own phone as the speaker, so they need you to sign in, and they use credits the way any room does — even the English one, where nothing is translated. Joining someone else’s room to listen is always free.

Ask first. Every time.

Here is the part that matters more than any of the above.

A lecture is someone’s work. A seminar has other students in it, saying half-formed things out loud, which is what seminars are for. Making a text record of either changes what the room is, and that is not a student’s decision to take quietly.

So ask. One line before the class is enough: “I use an app that writes a text record of the lecture on my phone so I can revise from it — it stays on my device. Is that all right with you?”

Some things worth knowing before you ask:

  • Institutions have rules about this already. Many universities have a recording policy covering lectures, seminars and placements. Look yours up rather than assuming — the answer is often “yes, for personal study, with permission” and sometimes “no” for clinical or confidential sessions.
  • If it is a disability accommodation, say so. Support for recording lectures is a common adjustment, and going through your disability service usually settles the permission question for the whole term rather than class by class.
  • A seminar is not a lecture. Other students have not agreed to anything. If the discussion is personal, put it away.
  • Personal study is not publication. Notes are for you. Passing a transcript of someone’s teaching around, or posting it, is a different act with different rules.

For lecturers: it costs you nothing to say yes or no, and it is much better asked than assumed. Some of you may want to run the room yourselves — one phone at the front, the code on the first slide — so that everyone follows in their own language and each student keeps their own copy. That is the version where you keep control of it.

What it is not

It is a live machine transcription, and it makes mistakes. Names, technical vocabulary and anything said at speed with a cold are where it slips. Treat it as a good record of what was said, not as a verbatim legal one, and check anything you are going to quote.

It also does not do the learning for you. What it removes is the panic of missing the sentence that explained the thing — not the need to sit and think about what was said afterwards. The best use is still the old one: listen properly, write the few things worth writing by hand, and let the record catch what your hand cannot.

Not only lecture halls

The same setup works anywhere the words matter and the notebook is losing: a long medical appointment you want to remember correctly, a church service in a language you do not speak, a meeting with a landlord or a lawyer, an interview you are conducting for a project, a language class where you want to see the words you are hearing.

The same consent applies in all of them, and in a few — anything medical, legal or confidential — the right answer is often not to. Ask, and respect the answer.

Looking for more on how yTranslate works? Visit the yTranslate blog.