Free AI Audio Transcriber — No Upload, No Account
This tool converts speech in an audio or video file into text using Whisper, an open-weight speech recognition model originally released by OpenAI. Unlike most "free transcription" sites, your file is never sent to a server — the model itself downloads to your browser once and does the actual listening and transcribing entirely on your device.
How It Works
When you choose a file, your browser decodes its audio track directly using the Web Audio API — the same technique our Video to MP3 tool uses. That audio is resampled and fed into Whisper, running through Transformers.js, a library that runs real machine learning models in-browser via WebAssembly. No servers are involved in the transcription itself at any point.
Choosing a Model
- Fast (English): whisper-tiny.en — smallest and quickest, tuned specifically for English
- Accurate (Multilingual): whisper-base — larger and slower, but handles dozens of languages and generally transcribes more accurately
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my audio really never uploaded? Correct — open your browser's network tab and you'll only see the one-time model download; your actual audio file never leaves your device.
Why did the first transcription take a while? The AI model has to download (40-80MB) before it can run. Your browser caches it, so future visits are much faster.
What file types are supported? MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC, FLAC, and OGG audio, plus MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI, and MKV video — the audio track is extracted from video automatically, the same way our video-to-audio converter works. Very old or proprietary formats like WMV/WMA sometimes aren't decodable in-browser depending on your browser; if a file fails, try converting it with our Video to MP3 tool first.
How accurate is it? Whisper is a strong general-purpose model, but accuracy depends on audio clarity, accents, and background noise. It's not perfect — always review the output before relying on it. If a transcript ever looks stuck repeating the same word or phrase, that's a known Whisper failure mode on tricky audio — try the other model, or a shorter clip.
What can I export? Plain text (.txt) with the transcript reflowed into natural paragraphs and no timestamps, or a timestamped .srt subtitle file ready to use with video editors or media players. Toggle "Show timestamps" above the transcript to switch the on-screen view between the two.