Free Audio Transcription — Whisper
Need to transcribe audio or video to text automatically? Whisper converts speech to text in 99 languages for free — interviews, podcasts, lectures, meetings. No subscription, no per-minute charges.
Transcribe Any Audio or Video to Text for Free — No Subscription, No Per-Minute Charges
Got a recorded interview you need typed out? A lecture you want to search? A podcast you want to turn into a blog post? A foreign-language video you want translated to English? Whisper turns spoken words into accurate text — for free, running entirely on your computer, with no subscription and no per-minute charges.
Paid transcription services like Otter.ai charge $17/month. Rev charges $1.50/minute for human transcription. Whisper does the same job for free — and for most use cases, the accuracy is on par or better.
Built by OpenAI and trained on 680,000 hours of real-world audio, Whisper handles accents, background noise, and poor recording quality better than most paid services. Supports 99 languages including Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic — and can translate foreign speech directly to English text without a separate translation step.
Runs entirely offline after installation. Your audio files never leave your computer. No API key, no subscription, no limits on file length or number of files.
Key Features
- Transcribe audio and video to text automatically — interviews, podcasts, lectures, meetings, voicemails
- 99 languages supported — Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and more
- Translate foreign speech to English — directly, without a separate translation tool
- Works offline — runs locally, no internet needed after install, files stay on your machine
- Handles noise, accents and poor audio — trained on 680,000 hours of real-world audio from OpenAI
- No limits — no subscription, no per-minute charges, no file size or file count limits
Who Is It For?
Journalists, podcasters, students, researchers, and anyone who needs to convert recorded audio or video into text without paying for transcription services like Otter.ai ($17/month) or Rev ($1.50/minute for human transcription).
Related Tools
- Ollama — Run local language models to summarize or process Whisper's transcripts — a complete offline AI pipeline
- Screenpipe — Continuously record and transcribe everything on your screen with AI, building on the same Whisper engine