Transcribe audio to text
Turn a recording into text you can read, search and paste. Works on video or audio, in a dozen-plus languages, with no account.
Transcribe audio to text
Speech → plain text, free
- Choose
- Process
- Download
Drop a file here, or click to choose
Up to 100MB · nothing is uploaded until you press Run
Up to 100MB
About this tool
This turns a recording into text. Upload an audio or video file and you get back a plain transcript you can read, search, paste into notes or hand to someone else. It runs on an open speech-recognition model on our servers rather than in your browser, so a long file will not tie up your laptop, and it works the same on a phone as on a desktop.
How to transcribe audio to text
- 1.Choose the audio or video file you want transcribed.
- 2.Pick the spoken language, or leave it on auto-detect.
- 3.Press Run and leave the tab open while it works.
- 4.Download the transcript as a .txt file.
When people use it
Interviews and research
Get a searchable record of a conversation instead of scrubbing back through audio to find the one quote you half-remember.
Meetings and calls
Turn a recorded call into text you can skim in a minute, then paste the parts that matter into your notes or a follow-up email.
Lectures and talks
Convert a recorded session into notes you can actually study from, and search for the term you need rather than replaying an hour.
Video scripts and captions
Pull the spoken words out of a video as a starting point for show notes, a blog version, or a caption file.
What it will not do
Worth knowing before you upload, rather than after.
- Accuracy drops on heavy accents, crosstalk, background noise and poor microphones. Read the transcript before you publish it.
- Speakers are not separated or labelled — you get continuous text, not a two-column interview script.
- It transcribes what was said in the language spoken; it does not translate into another language.
- Very quiet or music-only files will come back empty, because there is no speech to find.
Questions
Is this transcription really free?
Yes. Every tool here is free to use with no account and no watermark. Files up to 100MB, one job at a time.
Do I need to create an account?
No. There is no sign-up, no email box and no watermark on anything you download. A short-lived anonymous session identifies your job so nobody else can fetch it, and that is the only thing stored about you.
What file formats can I transcribe?
Audio files including MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG and FLAC, and video files including MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV. Video files have their audio extracted automatically, so you do not need to convert first.
What languages does it support?
Auto-detect handles most common languages, and you can force a specific one including English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic. Quality varies by language and by how clean the recording is.
How accurate is it?
Good on clear speech with a decent microphone, noticeably worse with heavy accents, several people talking over each other, or background noise. We do not publish an accuracy figure because we have not benchmarked it against a real corpus, and quoting someone else's number for our setup would be dishonest.
How long does it take?
Usually a fraction of the length of the recording, but one job runs at a time across the whole site, so you may queue briefly at a busy moment. Leave the tab open and it will tell you when the file is ready.
What happens to my file?
Your upload goes to private storage that is never public and never listed, and only the anonymous session that created the job can read it. The original file is deleted as soon as processing succeeds. The result stays available for about 90 minutes, and you can delete everything immediately with the Delete now button.
Can I get timed subtitles instead of plain text?
Yes — use the SRT or VTT subtitle tools. Same engine, same upload, but the output carries timestamps so it can be loaded as captions.
Is there a length limit?
Up to 10 minutes of recording and 100MB on the free tier. For a longer file, trim it into parts first.
Popular conversions
Other tools
Want bigger files, several at once, or no queue? See Pro.