Call transcription and summarization FAQ


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


What's my plan?







Add-on

Copilot










Add-on

Quality Assurance (QA) or Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)







Verified AI summary ◀▼
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.
Copilot and Zendesk QA call transcription and summary settings
are independent. Activating Copilot, to add transcripts and summaries to
tickets, does not send anything to Zendesk QA unless the Zendesk QA setting
is also turned on. Even if your Support to QA connection is active and has
no filters, transcripts and summaries are only sent to Zendesk QA when the
QA setting is on.
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 transcription 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.




How do I activate call transcription and summarization? You activate
call transcription and summarization for recorded calls in Admin Center. If
you have the Copilot add-on, you can activate transcripts and summaries for
tickets. If you have the Zendesk QA add-on, you can activate transcripts and summaries for
QA. The configuration settings are independent of one another to
accommodate for different needs (and subscriptions).


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 activated, 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, such as phone number charges or call
charges, 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 Voice 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.
Zendesk Contact Center can redact call recordings, see call recording settings in Contact
Center.



What languages are supported for call transcription? Post-call
transcription uses automatic transcription language detection. For supported
languages, see Zendesk language support by
product.
Real-time transcription uses the agents' Zendesk
profile language. All Zendesk agent languages are
supported.
If a language spoken during a call isn't supported, the
generated transcript might be inaccurate.


Are voicemail recordings also transcribed? On Suite plans, voicemail
transcription is available and can be turned on for each line in Admin
Center. Voicemail transcription uses the same transcription model used for
call recordings. For more information, 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 works with
Zendesk Voice only. If you're using a third-party telephony provider with
Talk Partner Edition, several Talk Partners 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 activate 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 tickets or sent to QA,
activate it for tickets or activate it for QA as the settings
are independent, just like the associated Copilot and Zendesk QA
add-ons.





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.




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