Convert MP3 to text
Recordings turned into readable text on this device, for notes, quotes and minutes.
- Nothing is uploaded
- Works offline after first use
- Open source
- No watermark · limit is your device’s memory; phones hold less
Convert an MP3, M4A voice memo or WAV recording to text in your browser. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. The first run downloads the speech model (about 76 MB) and the WebAssembly engine that runs it to your browser, and after that the tool works offline.
Done
Open the network tab. Your files never appear in it.
Add files and run the tool to see every request this tab makes.
Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.
A recorded interview, a lecture, a voice memo you dictated while walking: finding the one sentence you need means listening all the way through. A transcript turns it into text you can search, quote and paste into your notes.
A worked example: a journalist records a 25-minute phone interview as an M4A on an iPhone (Voice Memos saves M4A). Dropped here with the language left on Detect, the first half-minute is used to identify English, and the whole recording is transcribed in pieces cut at pauses. On a recent laptop that takes around six minutes. The text is split into paragraphs wherever someone paused for two seconds or more, which usually falls where the other person starts talking. Copy it into the article draft, and search it for the quote instead of scrubbing through the audio.
Because the model runs in your browser, sources, patients and clients never have their voice sent to a transcription company. Close the tab and nothing is left behind.
How it works
- Drop one or more audio files: MP3, M4A, WAV and more.
- Leave the language on Detect, or pick it for short or noisy recordings.
- Press Transcribe, then copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
In your browser, not on a server
Your browser’s own decoders read the sound, from an audio file or a video’s soundtrack, and it is resampled to 16 kHz mono in the tab. The recording is cut at pauses into pieces of up to 28 seconds, and each piece goes to OpenAI’s Whisper base model (MIT), 8-bit ONNX weights run by transformers.js (Apache-2.0) and onnxruntime-web (MIT) in a background worker. The model, 76 MB, is downloaded from this site on first use and cached. Its timed segments become paragraphs, SRT or WebVTT.
Compared with upload-based tools: Online transcription services upload the recording to their servers, cap free minutes, and some keep your audio to train their models. Here the model runs on your device: nothing is uploaded, there is no minute limit beyond your device’s memory (phones hold less), and it works offline after the first run.
Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after your first run to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.
Questions
Is there a length limit?
No fixed limit. Long recordings take proportionally longer, and very long ones (several hours) need a device with plenty of memory, since the whole recording is decoded first.
Why is my transcript missing punctuation or names?
Whisper adds punctuation itself, but mumbling, crosstalk and unusual names trip it up. Clear audio from a microphone close to the speaker gives the best result.
Will it work offline?
After the first run, yes: the page and the speech model are stored by your browser, so you can transcribe on a plane.
What if my recording is not an MP3?
It still works: WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC and other audio files are read the same way. Audio to text is the same tool set up for recorder files, meetings and lectures, and the general transcribe tool also takes video.
Is the file uploaded anywhere?
No. There is no server in this process. The page is a static file and the work is done by code running inside your browser tab. Give the page a short while after your first run to save itself for offline use; then you can turn off Wi-Fi and it still works.
More video and audio tools
Transcribe audio to text
Speech to text and subtitles made by an AI model running in this tab. Interviews, lectures and voice notes are never uploaded.
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Metronome
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Blur faces in video
Faces found and covered frame by frame, on your own device, for children, bystanders and anyone who did not agree to be filmed. Always watch the result before you share it.
Other conversions
Guides
- A free Otter.ai alternative with no monthly minute capOtter.ai's free tier meters your minutes each month and caps how long a single recording can run. Here is what that looks like, and an alternative with nothing to meter.
- How to transcribe audio to textEvery platform has a way to turn speech into text now, at very different prices. Here is what each one offers, and a free option that never uploads the recording.