Search Across Every Recording
As your library of recordings grows, finding one specific moment becomes harder. You might remember that a professor mentioned a particular term, or that a colleague raised a key point during a meeting last week, but scrolling through individual projects is slow and unreliable. Global Search in 12scribe solves this by letting you search across all your projects at once.
Type a word, phrase, or even a partial term into the search bar, and 12scribe scans every project name, marker title, marker description, and transcription segment in your library. Results appear instantly, grouped by project, so you can see exactly where your search term was mentioned and jump straight to that moment in the audio.
Global Search works on any content that has been transcribed. If a recording has not been transcribed yet, its audio content will not appear in search results, though the project name and any manual markers are always searchable. For the best search experience, make sure auto-transcription is enabled on your projects.
How It Works
To start a search, tap the Search icon on the main screen. A search bar appears at the top of the screen. Begin typing, and results update as you type. There is no need to press a search button or wait for loading.
Behind the scenes, 12scribe searches through four types of content simultaneously:
- Project names -- if your search term appears in a project title, that project is shown as a match
- Marker titles -- any marker whose title contains your term will appear, along with its timestamp
- Marker descriptions -- the descriptive text added to markers is also searched
- Transcription segments -- every sentence of every transcription across all your projects is scanned for matches
Results are ranked by relevance and grouped by project. If your term appears in multiple places within one project, all matches are listed together under that project heading. This grouping makes it easy to understand context without jumping between different views.
Result Types
Each search result includes enough context to help you decide whether it is the one you are looking for before you tap on it.
- Project name matches show the project title with your search term highlighted. Tapping opens the project directly.
- Marker matches show the marker title, its type (Flag, Favorite, or Fire), and the timestamp. You can see at a glance what time the marker was placed and what it was labeled. Tapping jumps straight to that marker in the player.
- Transcription matches show a snippet of the transcribed text with your search term highlighted in context. You see the surrounding words so you can confirm this is the right passage. Tapping opens the player at the exact second where that text was spoken.
The most powerful aspect of search is the transcription matching. If you remember even one unusual word from a lecture -- a technical term, a person's name, or a specific phrase -- you can find the exact moment it was said and listen to the surrounding context. This turns your audio library into a searchable knowledge base, similar to searching through a collection of documents.
Jumping to Audio
Every search result is directly linked to a specific moment in your audio. When you tap a transcription match, the player opens and playback begins at the exact timestamp where that text was spoken. For marker matches, the player jumps to the marker's start time. For project name matches, the project opens to its overview.
This means you can go from a vague memory of something someone said to listening to that exact moment in under five seconds. There is no need to scrub through a timeline, scan a full transcript, or guess where in the recording you might find what you are looking for.
After jumping to a result, you can use the player controls to rewind a few seconds for more context, or continue listening forward. Your original search results remain accessible -- tap the back button to return to the results list and try another match if the first one was not what you needed.
Search Tips
A few techniques will help you get better results faster:
- Use specific terms -- searching for "mitochondria" will give you targeted results, while "the" will return thousands of matches from every transcription
- Try partial words -- 12scribe matches partial strings, so typing "mitoch" will still find "mitochondria"
- Search for names -- if a speaker mentions a person, place, or brand name, search for it to find every reference across all your recordings
- Combine with markers -- if you marked an important moment during a lecture but cannot remember which project it was in, search for the marker title or description to find it. Learn more about filtering markers
For more advanced search strategies, including how to build habits that make your recordings more searchable from the start, see the dedicated Search Tips guide.