Transcribe Audio with AI
âšī¸ How it works:
- Upload your audio file
- Select language and transcribe
- Download result as Word file
â ī¸ Note: Only the first 5 minutes of the audio will be transcribed. If your file is longer than 5 minutes, the remaining audio will not be included in the output.
Turn Audio into a Word File
If it has speech in it, this will write it down. Upload any audio file — an interview, a podcast episode, a lecture, a news or radio clip, a voice memo, a recorded call — choose the language, and AI speech recognition turns the audio into a Word file you can open and edit straight away. The transcript comes back split into paragraphs rather than as one unbroken wall of text. No sign-up and no watermarks.
How to Transcribe an Audio File
- Click the upload area above or drag and drop your audio file (up to 10 MB).
- Select the language spoken in it.
- Transcribe, then download the text as a .docx Word file. (The first 5 minutes are transcribed.)
What You Get Back
A .docx Word document, not a plain block of text you have to reformat. It opens in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice or Pages, and you can edit, search and correct it like anything else you have written. The transcript is broken into paragraphs wherever the speaker pauses for more than about a second, which is usually where a new thought begins — so the shape of the document tends to follow the shape of the conversation.
When You Might Need This
- Quoting accurately from an interview without replaying it a dozen times
- Turning a lecture or a recorded class into notes you can search
- Writing up what was agreed in a meeting
- Getting a written version of a news, radio or podcast segment you want to cite
- Show notes or subtitles copy for something you have published
- Making spoken material readable for someone who cannot easily listen
- Finding the one sentence you know is somewhere in a long voice memo
- Working with audio in a language you read more comfortably than you hear
Features
- AI transcription – runs privately on our own server, with nothing sent to an outside provider
- Readable paragraphs – split at natural pauses instead of one long block
- Twelve languages – English (US & UK), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Arabic and Persian
- Word document output – a ready-to-edit .docx file
- Wide format support – MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A and WMA
Frequently Asked Questions
Upload the file, tell it which language is being spoken, and download the Word document it produces. There is nothing to install and no account to create. The work happens on our server while you wait, so you can leave the page open rather than babysitting a download.
Only the first 5 minutes are transcribed, and the rest is simply not included — so a 40-minute interview will come back as its opening five minutes, with no warning in the document itself. If you need a specific later section, use Trim Audio to cut that part out first and upload just that. For a long file end to end, splitting it into 5-minute pieces and transcribing them one at a time works, though it is laborious.
Because a single unbroken block of text is very hard to read or edit. Wherever the speaker pauses for more than about a second, a new paragraph starts — which in practice lands close to where they changed subject, took a breath, or handed over to someone else. It is not speaker identification, so a two-person conversation will not be labelled, but the breaks usually fall in sensible places.
Twelve: English (US & UK are listed separately), Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Arabic and Persian. You have to pick the right one before transcribing — the tool does not work out the language for itself, and choosing the wrong one produces nonsense rather than a translation.
Good on clear audio with one person speaking at a time, and it punctuates as it goes. What degrades it is overlapping voices, background noise, a distant or muffled microphone, and heavy echo — a phone recording made across a room is the hardest case. Names, places and specialist terms are worth checking afterwards, since there is nothing in the surrounding sentence to indicate how they should be spelt. Treat the result as a very good first draft rather than a finished record.
This page works from an audio file you already have, and returns a Word document. Voice to Text listens to your microphone as you speak and gives you text on screen to copy. Use this one for anything already recorded — an interview, a podcast, a broadcast clip. Use the other for dictation, where the words do not exist yet.
The transcription runs on our own server rather than being passed to an outside AI provider, and your file is deleted automatically rather than kept. Nothing you upload is used to train anything. That said, for genuinely confidential material — legal, medical or commercially sensitive recordings — the safest option is always software running on your own machine.
You get a Microsoft Word .docx file, which opens in Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and Pages. You can upload MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, M4A or WMA, up to 10 MB. If your file is over that limit, Compress Audio will usually bring it under without harming speech clarity.
Related Audio Tools
- Text to Speech – the reverse: turn text into spoken audio
- Convert Audio – change the audio format
- Compress Audio – reduce audio file size
- Trim Audio – cut the part you want to transcribe
- Join Audio – combine multiple audio files