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Call transcription and summarization, available with Copilot and QA add-ons, enhance support by adding transcripts and summaries to tickets or QA tools. You can activate these features in Admin Center for recorded calls, with options for real-time transcription. Costs are per minute, and sensitive data can be redacted. Supported languages include English, Spanish, and more. Troubleshoot accuracy with keyword boosting.

In this article, you'll find frequently asked questions and answers about call transcription and summarization.

This article contains the following sections:

  • General questions
  • Troubleshooting questions

General questions

  • What options are available for call transcription and summarization?

    Call transcription and summarization are included as part of the Copilot and Zendesk QA add-ons. The underlying service which transcribes and summarizes calls is the same, but what differs is where the resulting transcripts and summaries are viewed and how they are used.

    Real-time transcription powers the real-time suggestions feature for Voice. If this is turned on, the real-time transcript is used in place of the post-call transciption on ticket comments and in QA.

    • Copilot add-on

      Call transcripts and summaries are added to the conversation log on tickets in the Agent Workspace. Transcripts and summaries provide additional context to voice tickets and reduce the requirement for agents to take notes and summarize calls as part of their wrap-up activities.

    • Zendesk QA add-on

      Call transcripts and summaries appear in Zendesk QA where QA-focused users can review and analyze historical call interactions in detail. Voice QA evaluates the call transcript and provides a QA Score just like it does for chat or messaging conversations which can be used to identify the conversations where there’s a churn risk or an agent knowledge gap.

    You can select one or both settings to send transcripts and summaries to tickets and Zendesk QA.

  • How do I activate call transcription and summarization?

    If you have a subscription for either the Copilot add-on or the Zendesk QA add-on, you can turn on call transcription and summarization in Admin Center. Depending on which add-ons are subscribed to, admins can configure which phone calls get transcribed and summarized and whether the resulting transcripts and summaries appear in tickets or in the QA tool.

  • Do I need Copilot to get transcripts and summaries in Zendesk QA?

    No. You just need a subscription for Zendesk QA to activate transcripts and summaries.

  • Is every phone call transcribed and summarized?

    No, only calls which are recorded can be transcribed and summarized. Admins can turn on the transcription and summarization functionality for some or all phone lines that have turned on call recording.

  • How are call transcriptions priced?

    Call transcription is charged at USD$0.01 per minute and real-time transcription is charged at $0.027 per minute of transcribed audio. Transcription charges are rounded up to the nearest whole minute. If real-time transcription and post-call transcription are both enabled on a call, customers are charged $0.027 because the call is only transcribed once, in real-time. Transcription charges are processed together with other usage charges for voice (e.g. phone number charges, call charges, recordings charges, etc.) and deducted from an account's credit balance.

    For more pricing information, see the pricing page for voice.

    Note: If calls are transcribed as part of both Copilot and Zendesk QA subscriptions, transcription costs will only be processed once for a given phone call. You won't be charged twice.
  • Where do call transcripts and call summaries appear?

    After a phone call ends and the call recording audio file becomes available to play in a ticket, the call transcript and summary are added to the ticket conversation log as internal notes.

  • Can Zendesk automatically redact sensitive customer data from transcripts and call summaries?

    Yes, if you have the Advanced Data Privacy and Protection add-on, you can configure Zendesk to automatically redact personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI) data from call recording transcriptions and summaries.

    Important: Zendesk can't redact PII/PCI data from call recording audio files. To ensure this personal information isn't accessible to users through the audio player in tickets, you must delete call recording files.
  • What languages are supported for call transcription?

    Post-call transcription uses automatic transcription language detection and works for the following languages: Spanish, English, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, French, German, Indonesian, Korean and Italian.

    Real-time transcription uses the agents' Zendesk profile language. All Zendesk agent languages are supported.

    If a language spoken during a call is not listed above, the generated transcript might be inaccurate.

  • Are voicemail recordings also transcribed?

    Yes, English-language voicemail recordings can also be transcribed into text. No other languages are supported for voicemail transcription at this time. See Configuring voicemail options.

  • Is the call transcript or call summary shared with or retained by a third party? Is customer data used to train the models?

    The transcription and summarization features are powered by Deepgram and OpenAI’s Enterprise service. These services do not use Zendesk customers' inputs to train their models or otherwise improve their services, and Zendesk customer data will not be hosted except briefly for the purpose of providing the service. See Zendesk AI data use information for more information about how your data is protected.

  • How can customers export their transcription charges?

    From the usage charges page, users can review their transcription charges for a given period and export a CSV file containing detailed charges. Users receive an email with a ZIP file attachment, which contains the CSV of charges for the period.

  • Is the call transcription and summarization functionality available for Talk Partner Edition?

    Call transcription and summarization currently works for Zendesk customers only. However, several Talk Partners already offer transcription services, including adding call transcripts to Zendesk tickets.

  • Can agents view the real-time transcript in the Agent Workspace?

    Agents cannot currently view the real-time transcript in the Agent Workspace. The real-time transcript is currently used by Zendesk to allow agents to generate AI suggestions during live calls.

  • If I enable the real-time AI suggestions feature for voice calls, will the call transcript and call summary be automatically added to the ticket (or sent to QA) after the call ends?

    Not automatically. If you want the call transcript and call summary to get added to the ticket (or sent to QA), enable that separately.

Troubleshooting questions

  • Why do call transcripts sometimes contain errors or inaccuracies?

    Today, the best speech-to-text algorithms are around 90% accurate, meaning that for every 100 words processed, only 90 are accurately transcribed. Many factors can influence the accuracy of the transcription, including background noise, speakers talking over each other, poor quality audio connections or network signal, speaker dialects, quiet speech, or words and phrases not being in the training model database.

  • How can I improve the accuracy of transcriptions?

    Use keyword boosting to specify words that are expected to occur in your phone conversations. This might include product names or industry-specific terms. Adding keywords in advance helps improve recognition and the accuracy of transcriptions.

  • Why is the call transcript or call summary different to what was spoken on the call?

    On rare occasions AI can "hallucinate" and provide an inaccurate answer if it is acting on limited data. The primary cause of hallucination lies in the limitations of the training data and neural network algorithms that AI models use to 'learn.' AI models, particularly those based on deep learning, learn patterns and associations from massive datasets. If the training data is biased, incomplete, or contains errors, the AI may develop skewed perceptions, leading to hallucinatory outputs. For example, hallucinations can happen when there are periods of silence or background noise in a phone call, making it challenging for the AI to figure out what was actually said.

  • How can I prevent the call transcript from taking up a lot of space on the ticket conversation log?

    For customers with a subscription to Copilot, there is an option to hide the call transcript on tickets.

  • Why is there a delay in creating a ticket from a voicemail when voicemail transcription is turned on?

    When a voicemail message contains no speech, the transcription service attempts several times to transcribe the audio file before stopping. This might lead to a delay of up to 30 minutes before the ticket is created.

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