What the Google Drive connection does
Pepys can read a recording directly out of Drive and hand it to the transcription pipeline. That means an interview recording, a board meeting export, or a phone memo that already lives in Drive never has to be downloaded to your machine and uploaded again – you point Pepys at the file and the transcript comes back.
There are two ways in: paste a shared Drive link into the uploader on the transcribe page, or open Google's file picker from the uploader and choose files. Both are covered below.
Access is scoped per file. Pepys asks Google for the drive.file permission, which covers files you have explicitly granted it through the picker – not your whole Drive. Stored credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are written to our database, and the media is fetched at transcription time with a short-lived access token.
Connect Drive in Settings
Open Settings → Integrations and press Connect Google Drive. Google shows its consent screen; choose the account that holds the recordings and approve access. Back in Pepys the row reads as connected, and it stays connected until you disconnect it or Google revokes the grant.
If the connection ever breaks – you changed your Google password, or revoked Pepys from your Google account page – imports for that connection stop and the row asks you to reconnect. Reconnecting keeps your existing imports and simply issues a fresh set of tokens.
Import a file from a shared link
Paste the file's Drive link into the uploader. If Pepys has not been connected to Drive yet, it walks you through the connection first, then opens Google's picker.
Choose the same file whose link you pasted. That step is what grants Pepys access to that specific file, which is why the paste and the pick have to match – a bare link alone is not enough permission for a third-party app to read a Drive file. Once the file is picked, the transcription starts like any other job.
Pick files from Drive
Press the Drive button in the uploader and Google's picker opens on your Drive. Select a recording and Pepys imports it immediately.
A paid account can select up to 10 files in one go; each becomes its own transcription. A free account imports one file at a time, and the first three connected-source imports are free – after that the picker asks you to buy credits before importing more.
Keep a folder flowing in automatically
Automatic folder imports are available with any credit purchase. Pick a folder once in Settings → Integrations and Pepys watches it: new recordings that land in that folder are queued for transcription on their own, so a recorder that syncs to Drive becomes a transcript pipeline with no manual step.
The folder setting has its own speaker-labels switch, so you can decide per folder whether you want diarization on the incoming jobs. You can pause the automation at any time from the same row, and if Google access is revoked the sync pauses and tells you rather than failing silently.
Good to know
Imported recordings bill exactly like uploaded ones: per minute, against your credits, at 1 credit = 1 minute. The 60 free minutes granted at signup cover Drive imports too.
Once the transcript is ready it behaves like any other: speaker labels, AI summary, and exports in TXT, Markdown, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT, and JSON. To take a transcript back out of Pepys, see your first transcription.
The other routes in – OneDrive, Zoom, Telegram, and the rest – are listed on the integrations page.