Free AI Speech to Text Online

An hour of audio is useless when you need to find one sentence in it. This page fixes that. Record yourself talking, or drop in an MP3, WAV or any common audio file, and OwnSound turns the speech into written text using Whisper, OpenAI's speech recognition model. The whole thing runs on your computer, so it costs nothing, and the result comes out as editable text or as timed SRT subtitles ready for captions.

You don't need an account, there's nothing to install, and there's no per-minute fee hiding anywhere. That last part matters if you've ever hit a transcription service's limit halfway through an interview. Because the audio never gets sent to a server, you can run private meetings, sensitive recordings and unreleased material through it without a second thought.

How to Transcribe Audio to Text

1. Feed it audio. Hit Record and talk, or drag a file into the box — MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, AAC and WebM all work. Long files are fine; the tool chops them up and works through them in pieces.
2. Pick a model and press Transcribe. Accurate handles 99+ languages and detects the language on its own. Fast is English-only and noticeably quicker. The first time you use it, the model downloads once (~250 MB) and then stays cached, so later visits skip straight to the good part.
3. Take the text. Copy it to your clipboard, download it as a .txt file, or grab a .srt subtitle file with start and end timestamps on every line.

How Accurate Is AI Speech to Text?

Whisper is OpenAI's open-source speech recognizer, trained on 680,000 hours of audio — real people talking in real rooms, across dozens of languages. That's the key difference from the old dictation programs, which ran on hand-written rules about grammar and phonetics and collapsed the moment someone had an accent or a fan was humming nearby. Whisper learned by listening, the way a person does, so on a clean recording it lands close to what a human transcriber would write.

Most of the errors you'll see come down to the recording, not the model. A decent microphone in a quiet room gives you text you can use almost as-is. A phone in a pocket in a busy café? Expect gaps, wrong words and missing punctuation. Heavy accents, overlapping speakers and loud music push the error rate up too. Every transcription tool has this same ceiling, so the single best thing you can do is get a clean recording in the first place.

Supported Languages & Audio Formats

On the language side, the Accurate model auto-detects 99+ languages, from the obvious ones (Spanish, French, German, Japanese) to the less common, and you can pin it to a specific language for a small accuracy boost when you already know what you're listening to. Fast skips the multilingual range and just does English, faster. On the file side, if your browser can play it, this can probably transcribe it: MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, AAC and WebM are all welcome. The output is plain .txt for editing, or .srt with timestamps for captions.

Export SRT Subtitles & Timestamps

If you make videos, the SRT export is probably the part you'll use most. Download the transcript as an SRT file and every line carries a start and end timestamp, so when you upload it to YouTube, TikTok or Instagram the captions snap to the right moment automatically. No typing out each line, no fiddling with the timing. It's the difference between captioning a ten-minute video in one click and spending an evening on it.

Where Your Audio Goes — Free & Private

Here's the thing most people don't realize about cloud transcription: when you upload a file, you're sending a copy of your recording to a company's servers, where it sits while their model chews on it. That's why those services ask for an account, why they meter you, and why they charge — someone has to pay for all that computing. This tool flips it. Whisper gets downloaded into your browser and runs right there, so your audio is decoded and transcribed on your computer.

Nothing is uploaded, and no server is involved at all. If you're transcribing an interview with an off-the-record source, a legal recording, or a song that hasn't been released yet, that's a real difference — you're not handing anyone a copy. It's also why the price is what it is: there's no computing bill for us to pass along, so there's no reason to cap you or put a paywall in your way.

Tips for Cleaner Speech to Text Results

• Record in a quiet room. Background noise is the single biggest accuracy killer — a running fan or a TV in the next room will bleed into every line.
• Keep the mic close to whoever's talking. A microphone on the other side of a conference table sounds like everyone is in the next room.
• Use a desktop with Chrome or Edge. Desktop browsers give the model more memory and a noticeably faster run than a phone will.
• Trim long files before you start. If you only need ten minutes of an hour-long recording, cutting it first saves a lot of waiting.
• Set the language manually when you know it. It removes the guesswork and picks up a small accuracy gain, especially on less common languages.

Speech to Text Use Cases

OwnSound vs. Otter.ai, TurboScribe & Rev

If you've used Otter or TurboScribe, the table below will tell you what's actually different. The short version: cloud tools are faster and work anywhere, but they meter you and keep a copy of your file. OwnSound is slower and desktop-only, but it's free, unlimited, and the audio stays on your computer.

	OwnSound	Otter.ai	TurboScribe	Rev
Price	Free, unlimited	Freemium (~300 min/mo)	Freemium (3 files/day)	Paid per minute
Account required	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Audio uploaded	Never	Yes	Yes	Yes
Where it runs	Your browser	Their servers	Their servers	Their servers
Speed	Minutes	Seconds	Seconds	Minutes–hours
Accuracy model	Whisper (local)	Proprietary	Whisper (cloud)	AI + human review
Languages	99+	English-focused	98+	36
SRT subtitle export	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
TXT export	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
File length limit	None	~40 min (free)	~30 min (free)	None (paid)
Usage cap	None	~300 min/mo	3 files/day	Paid per minute
Works on mobile	Best on desktop	Yes	Yes	Yes