Does it handle strong accents?

Better than any other language here. Scottish, Indian, Southern US, Australian and non-native English all transcribe well on clean audio; the usual limits are background noise and people talking over each other, not the accent.

What is the difference between Private and Instant mode?

Private runs the speech model in your browser after a one-time download and never sends audio anywhere. Instant (Chrome only) uses the browser’s built-in recogniser, which sends the audio to Google, in exchange for zero download and real-time speed. Both are free; the page defaults to Private.

Can I get timestamps or subtitles?

Yes. Tick "Timestamps" for [mm:ss] markers in the text, or use the Subtitle Generator page for an .SRT or .VTT file ready for YouTube or a video editor.

Transcribe English Audio to Text — Free, No Upload

Turn English audio or video into text in your browser. 100% free, no per-minute limit, no signup — meetings, lectures and voice memos never leave your device.

Model

Spoken

Output

Timestamps [0:05]

⬇️ One-time download: 104 MB (Accurate model 73 MB + 31 MB audio engine, shared with the video tools) — only the first time: it stays saved in your browser, so next time it starts right away. (Translating or switching model needs its own file; a browser can clear this cache if storage runs very low.) Processing takes about 4-8 min per 10 minutes of audio on a typical laptop.

What exactly is downloaded — and is it safe?

• The speech model is OpenAI's Whisper, open source, converted to run in browsers. The audio engine is FFmpeg, the open-source tool behind most video software.
• They come from Hugging Face and unpkg — public repositories used by researchers and developers worldwide, not from us.
• They are not programs. Nothing is installed, no permission is asked, and your browser keeps them in its own cache exactly like it keeps a website's images.
• They can't read your files or touch anything outside this page. Remove them any time by clearing this site's data in your browser.
• Your audio never goes the other way: this site has no server receiving files.

Drop your video or audio here or click to choose

transcribed on your device by OpenAI's Whisper — your recording is not uploaded

ℹ️ Use a recording on your device that you own or have permission to process. This tool cannot fetch YouTube or social video links. Start with a short clip. Larger models can improve accuracy but require more memory and download data. Processing time varies by device, model and recording length. Always review the result.

English is the language the model knows best, by a wide margin: it was trained on more English audio than every other language combined, so clean recordings come out with punctuation, capitalisation and numbers already in place. Meetings, lectures, interviews, podcast episodes and phone voice memos all work, and the transcript reads like something a person typed rather than a stream of lowercase words.

Two things are specific to English on this site. First, accents: American, British, Australian, Indian, Irish, Nigerian and Singaporean English are all well represented in the training data, so you do not need to pick a region. Second, English is the one language where the optional Instant mode (Chrome only) works with nothing to download, at real-time speed, by sending the audio to Google's recogniser; the default Private mode keeps everything on your device instead. The page opens with English selected, is free, and has no minute limit.

More sizes & options

Frequently asked questions

Does it handle strong accents?: Better than any other language here. Scottish, Indian, Southern US, Australian and non-native English all transcribe well on clean audio; the usual limits are background noise and people talking over each other, not the accent.
What is the difference between Private and Instant mode?: Private runs the speech model in your browser after a one-time download and never sends audio anywhere. Instant (Chrome only) uses the browser’s built-in recogniser, which sends the audio to Google, in exchange for zero download and real-time speed. Both are free; the page defaults to Private.
Can I get timestamps or subtitles?: Yes. Tick "Timestamps" for [mm:ss] markers in the text, or use the Subtitle Generator page for an .SRT or .VTT file ready for YouTube or a video editor.

Guides

Related tools

🔒 Private mode (the default): your recording never leaves your device. Instant mode is optional, you switch it on yourself, and it sends the audio to the browser's speech service.