Transcribe Audio to Text with AI

AI transcription usually means handing your recording to somebody else's server. This tool runs OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model on your own machine instead — the same class of model behind the paid transcription services, executed locally through WebAssembly. The audio is never uploaded, and neither is the transcript. That makes it usable for material you are not permitted to send to a third party: legal recordings, medical or therapy sessions, HR interviews, and journalism where a source needs protecting. Translation runs the same way, through a Marian neural machine translation model. Export as plain text or as timestamped .srt subtitles.

How to Transcribe Audio to Text with AI

  1. 1

    Choose a model size

    Whisper comes in several sizes. Tiny is fastest, Small is the most accurate on accents, noise and crosstalk. Base is a good middle default.

  2. 2

    Download the model

    The AI model is cached in your browser after the first download, so later transcriptions start immediately and work offline.

  3. 3

    Add your recording

    Drop in an audio file. You can queue several and add translation outputs alongside the original language.

  4. 4

    Transcribe and export

    Run the queue, then download the transcript as .txt or as .srt with timestamps.

How it works

Whisper is a transformer-based speech recognition model trained on a very large multilingual corpus, which is why it copes with accents, crosstalk and background noise far better than the rule-based dictation software that came before it. Here it runs as an ONNX model executed by WebAssembly in a Web Worker, so inference happens on your CPU and the page stays responsive. Traditional DSP still does the preparation: your file is decoded and resampled to the 16 kHz mono signal the model expects before a single frame reaches the network. Translation adds a second AI model, a Marian encoder-decoder, applied to the finished transcript.

Supported formats

WAV, MP3, M4A, AAC, OGG and FLAC. Files are decoded by your browser, so anything it can play will work here. Output is exported as WAV.

Frequently asked questions

Is my audio uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything runs inside your browser using the Web Audio API, so the file never leaves your device. You can prove it: load the page, turn off your Wi-Fi, and the tool still works.
Can I transcribe confidential recordings?
That is exactly what this is for. Because inference runs locally, no part of the recording or transcript is transmitted, which is what makes it usable where uploading to a cloud transcription service is not permitted.
Does it work in languages other than English?
Yes. The Whisper models are multilingual, covering over 90 languages, and you can add AI-translated outputs to English or to other languages alongside the original transcript.
Does this use AI?
Yes. Transcription runs Whisper, a neural speech recognition model, and translation runs a Marian neural machine translation model. Both are real AI models — the difference from a cloud service is only where they run, which here is your own device rather than someone else's server.
Do I need an account?
No. The free tools work straight away with no sign-up. Creating a free account raises your daily processing limit from 20 to 60 minutes.
Is it free?
Yes. Every tool on this page is free to use, with a daily limit on total audio processed. There is no watermark and no trial period.

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