Is there a free AI to transcribe audio?
Yes, several, and they are free in different ways. Whisper is genuinely free with no account and no limit, and you have to run it yourself. Otter and Hilite are free in the browser with monthly caps. Your phone already does it for short recordings. Which one is right depends on whether you are transcribing one voice note or fifty hours of interviews, so here is what each actually gives you.
Upload a file, get speaker labels and timestamps back.
Free transcription without the setup
- 1
Whisper, if you are comfortable with a terminal
OpenAI's Whisper model is open source and free to run on your own machine with no account, no upload limit and no monthly cap. It gives you the words and no interface. You get no speaker labels in the base model, and you will be installing Python.
- 2
A browser tool, if you are not
Hilite transcribes in the browser with speaker labels, clickable timestamps, 99+ languages and export as TXT, DOCX or SRT. Free to start, nothing to install, and the transcript stays linked to the audio so corrections take one click.
- 3
Otter, if the job is meetings
Otter's free tier gives you a monthly minute allowance and is built around recurring meetings and note-taking. Good at that specific job, capped, and less suited to long-form or published audio.
- 4
Check what you already have
Apple's Voice Memos and Google's Recorder transcribe on the device for free. For a two-minute voice note there is often no reason to go anywhere else.
Keep working inside the Hilite editor
Your uploaded files open directly in a focused editor view. Arrange your clips, preview the timeline, adjust transitions, and export when the track sounds perfectly right.
- Review the transcript in context
- Keep timestamps with the words
- Copy, export, or keep editing
Input formats
Output formats
Built for every kind of audio
Whatever you are making, this tool helps you get to a cleaner, more useful result, then hand off to Hilite to enhance and polish.
- Free means different thingsFree and open source with setup cost. Free with a monthly cap. Free to start and paid beyond a point. All three are honestly called free and they suit completely different people.
- Accuracy is mostly the recordingNearly every option here runs a Whisper-class model, so the gap between them is smaller than the marketing suggests. A quiet room and a decent microphone will improve your transcript more than switching tools.
- The difference is what happens nextGetting the words out is largely solved. What separates these is speaker labels, timestamps, export formats and whether the transcript is still connected to the audio when you need to check something.
Made for podcasters and their teams
Trim the dead air off the top and tail, and every recording is ready to edit, enhance, and publish.
FAQ
Common questions
If you do not see your question here, the support team replies within one business day.
- Whisper if you can run it yourself, because it is unlimited and costs nothing. Hilite if you want speaker labels, timestamps and subtitle export without installing anything. Those two cover most people.
- On clear speech, yes, typically well above ninety percent. It degrades on background noise, crosstalk and heavy accents, and it slips on names, jargon and acronyms. What matters in practice is how fast you can fix the words it got wrong.
- Fewer than you would expect. Base Whisper has no speaker diarization at all. Hilite and Otter both provide speaker labels on their free tiers. If your recording has more than one voice, this is the feature to check first.
- With Whisper, yes, with no limit. With browser tools, the free tiers have monthly caps, so a fifty-hour archive will hit them. Hilite takes long files whole rather than making you split them.
- Whisper does, once installed, which also makes it the right answer for confidential recordings that should not leave your machine. Everything browser-based uploads the audio.
Free, in the browser, with the parts that matter
Speaker labels, clickable timestamps and TXT, DOCX or SRT export. Nothing to install.