The short answer
For most people transcribing recordings, TurboScribe is the pick: 3 free files a day of up to 30 minutes each, then $20 a month with no cap on hours. On a Mac, MacWhisper's free version transcribes privately with no limit. ElevenLabs has the lowest error rate of these on an independent benchmark, and Rev's human transcripts ($1.99 a minute) are for quotes that must be right.
Which AI transcription tool should you use?
Pick by what you are transcribing and where it can go. Prices are as of October 2026.
- Most people with recordings to transcribe: TurboScribe. A website that gives you 3 free files a day of up to 30 minutes each, then charges a flat $20 a month with no cap on hours.
- Free and private on a Mac: MacWhisper. The free version transcribes on your Mac with no limit, so the audio never leaves it.
- On a phone: the built-in Voice Memos app transcribes for free on an iPhone 12 or later, and Recorder does the same on Google Pixel phones. For privacy in any of 100 languages on an iPhone, Aiko does it on the phone for $24 once.
- Hard audio, accents or jargon: ElevenLabs. Its Scribe v2 model has the lowest error rate of these tools on an independent benchmark, at about $3.60 an hour of audio.
- Quotes or legal records that must be right: Rev. People check the transcript, guaranteed 99%+ accurate, for $1.99 a minute.
- Developers and big batches on your own hardware: Whisper, OpenAI's free open-source model.
- Editing a podcast or video: Descript, where cutting the transcript cuts the recording.
This guide is about turning a recording you already have, or are about to make, into text, with software. Live calls are a different job, covered in the best AI meeting note takers; typing by voice into other apps is in the best AI dictation apps. Hardware recorders that transcribe, such as Plaud's, are left out.
How much does transcription cost per hour of audio?
Transcribing an hour of audio costs anywhere from nothing to about $119, depending on whether a computer or a person does it. Pricing pages quote minutes, credits, seats or "unlimited", so the table converts each plan to the same unit. Prices were read on the makers' pages in October 2026.
| Tool and plan | Price | Audio included | Cost per hour if you use it all | Bill for a 10-hour month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MacWhisper Free (Mac) | €0 | No cap, runs on your Mac | €0 | €0 |
| Whisper (any computer) | $0 | No cap, your hardware | $0 | $0 |
| Aiko (iPhone, iPad, Mac) | $24 once | No cap, on device | Falls toward $0 | $24 once |
| TurboScribe Unlimited | $20 a month, or $120 a year | No cap | $2.00 at 10 hours, $0.67 at 30 hours | $20 |
| Otter.ai Pro | $16.99 a month, or $8.33 billed yearly | 20 hours, but only 10 file imports | $0.85 | $16.99, if it fits in 10 files |
| Descript Hobbyist | $24 a month, or $16 billed yearly | 10 hours | $2.40 | $24 |
| Rev Essentials | $29.99 a seat a month | About 83 hours, English and Spanish | $0.36 | $29.99 |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $22 a month | About 6 hours | $3.60 | More than $22: Creator covers about 6 hours, then top-up credits (rate not published) or Pro at $99 |
| Rev human transcription | $1.99 a minute | Pay per minute | $119.40 | $1,194 |
Sources for the table: TurboScribe pricing, Otter pricing, Descript pricing, Rev pricing, ElevenLabs pricing (Speech to Text costs 330 credits a minute, from credits shared with its voice tools), MacWhisper and Aiko. A "10-hour month" is, for example, ten one-hour interviews.
Flat-price TurboScribe gets cheaper per hour the more you use it, while ElevenLabs' credits cost about $3.30 to $4 an hour on every plan. Rev's AI plan works out at $0.36 an hour, but only if you use most of its 5,000 minutes, and Rev now sells it as a tool for legal teams.
Which free transcription tool gives you the most?
The only free options with no cap run on your own device: MacWhisper on a Mac, Whisper on any computer, Voice Memos on an iPhone and Recorder on a Pixel. Of the online services, TurboScribe's free plan is the most generous by a wide margin, at up to 90 minutes a day.
| Tool | Free allowance, October 2026 | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| MacWhisper | No cap | Mac only; speaker labels, batch jobs and the Parakeet models need Pro (€64 once) |
| Whisper | No cap | Runs from the command line; the large model wants about 10 GB of graphics memory |
| TurboScribe | 3 files a day, each up to 30 minutes | One file at a time; longer files need Unlimited |
| Otter.ai Basic | 300 minutes a month | 30 minutes per conversation, and 3 file imports per account, ever |
| Descript | 60 minutes a month | Exports are 720p with a watermark |
| Rev | 45 minutes a month | English only |
| ElevenLabs | About 12 minutes a month, per its Speech to Text page | The same credits pay for its voice tools |
Assistants asked about free lecture transcription in October 2026 suggested Otter's free plan, and it is the wrong fit for recordings: Otter's pricing page caps each conversation at 30 minutes, so a 50-minute lecture doesn't fit. Record it with Voice Memos or any recorder, then transcribe the file.
TurboScribe: best for most people transcribing recordings
TurboScribe is the default pick because its free plan covers occasional use and its paid plan has no meter. Free accounts get 3 files a day, each up to 30 minutes, one at a time; Unlimited costs $20 a month, or $10 a month billed yearly, for one person, as of October 2026 (pricing). Paid files can run 10 hours and 5 GB, up to 50 at once, and TurboScribe's FAQ says there are no caps on total usage; the stated rule is that you can't share your login.
It runs OpenAI's Whisper models on its own servers and advertises 98+ languages, with its best results in about 22 of them. Speaker labels are a checkbox at upload, and a Restore Audio option cleans up noisy files first. Its security FAQ says files are encrypted at rest, never used to train models, and gone for good when you delete them.
"Is TurboScribe safe" is a common search. For the audio, the answer depends on the recording, not the site: any upload leaves your control, so confidential sources, patient audio or legal material belong in a tool that runs on your own device. TurboScribe is a website only, and Apple's App Store had no TurboScribe app in October 2026, so an app with a similar name is someone else's. For your money, the complaints are about billing: TurboScribe rates 4.5 out of 5 on Trustpilot as of October 2026, but its recent one-star reviews mostly report charges after cancelling and unanswered support emails, and one describes a refused refund on a $120 yearly renewal. Cancel well before renewal, and pay monthly until you know you will use it all year.
Skip TurboScribe if the audio can't be uploaded (use MacWhisper or Aiko), or the recording is noisy, heavily accented or full of jargon and errors are costly. The independent benchmark below never tested TurboScribe itself, but on it ElevenLabs' model made about half as many errors (2.2% against 4.1%) as OpenAI's Whisper Large v2, the model behind TurboScribe's most accurate mode.
MacWhisper: best free and private option on a Mac
MacWhisper is the pick for anyone on a Mac who wants transcripts without uploading anything. It runs speech models locally, so a sensitive interview never leaves the computer (MacWhisper). The free version runs Whisper with no usage cap: record from the microphone or drop in mp3, wav, m4a, ogg, opus, mov or mp4 files, in 100 languages, and export text or .srt and .vtt subtitles. Not every Whisper model is fully available on the free version, and the faster Parakeet and Qwen3-ASR models are Pro only, per its Gumroad page.
MacWhisper Pro is a one-time €64 license, not a subscription, as of October 2026. It adds automatic speaker labels, batch transcription, YouTube links, translation, Word and PDF export, automatic meeting recording and watched folders. For a journalist transcribing a few interviews a week, that one payment costs less than a year of TurboScribe Unlimited ($120).
Pro also sends files to cloud transcription services with your own API key, ElevenLabs and Deepgram among them. That is the cheapest way to get ElevenLabs' accuracy without writing code: Scribe v2 costs $0.22 an hour through ElevenLabs' API, against about $3.60 an hour in its own app.
Buy it only from macwhisper.com, its Gumroad page or the App Store: its developer, Good Snooze, warns that fake MacWhisper sites may carry malware.
Skip MacWhisper if you use Windows or Linux (Whisper or TurboScribe instead), or you need speaker labels and don't want to pay for Pro (TurboScribe's free plan includes them).
What's the best transcription app for iPhone?
For most iPhone owners the best transcription app is the one already installed. Voice Memos transcribes recordings for free on an iPhone 12 or later, live while you record or afterward, and you can copy the whole transcript or search across recordings (Apple Support). It works in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and not in every country. That covers a lecture or a voice note. On a Google Pixel, the built-in Recorder app does the same job: it transcribes as you record, labels speakers on a Pixel 6 or later and summarizes recordings on a Pixel 8 or later (Pixel help).
Aiko is the pick when the recording is private or in another language. It runs Whisper on the phone itself, so nothing is uploaded, and handles 100 languages (Aiko). It costs $24 once, covering iPhone, iPad and Mac, with a 14-day trial through TestFlight. The trade-offs: on iPhone it uses Whisper's medium or small model depending on memory, which are less accurate than the large model it uses on a Mac; it has no speaker labels; it doesn't transcribe live; and the current version needs iOS 26 or later.
For a long recording you want labeled by speaker, open TurboScribe in Safari and upload the file. It works the same on a phone.
ElevenLabs: most accurate for difficult audio
ElevenLabs, better known for AI voices, has one of the most accurate transcription models available to consumers. On the Artificial Analysis speech-to-text benchmark, which scores about 8 hours of agent-style conversations, earnings calls and European Parliament speeches in English, its Scribe v2 model gets 2.2% of words wrong, joint fourth among the models it ranked in October 2026 and the best of any tool in this guide. OpenAI's Whisper Large v2, which TurboScribe's most accurate mode runs, scores 4.1%; hosted Whisper Large v3 scores 4.1% on fal.ai, 4.5% on Together AI and 10.1% on Replicate. The benchmark doesn't test TurboScribe, MacWhisper or Aiko themselves, the smaller Whisper models Aiko uses on an iPhone, or accuracy in other languages.
In practice, assuming a speaker talks at 150 words a minute, an hour of talk is about 9,000 words. At 2.2% that is roughly 200 words to fix; at 4.1%, roughly 370. Your audio will differ from the benchmark's, but the gap shows where better accuracy saves real editing time.
Scribe v2 is in the ElevenLabs web app under Speech to Text: upload audio or video up to 3 GB, get speaker labels for up to 32 people (ElevenLabs docs), and add up to 100 key terms such as names and jargon so it spells them right, for 20% more (web app guide); the API takes up to 1,000. It lists 99 languages on its Speech to Text page, about the same as TurboScribe's 98+.
The catch is price. Transcription costs 330 credits a minute (pricing), so as of October 2026 the free plan covers about 12 minutes a month (per ElevenLabs' Speech to Text page), Starter ($6) about 90 minutes, Creator ($22) about 6 hours and Pro ($99) about 30 hours. Creator can buy top-up credits beyond that, at a rate the pricing page doesn't publish. Through the API it costs $0.22 an hour (API pricing), which MacWhisper Pro users can tap with their own key.
Skip ElevenLabs if you transcribe many hours of clear speech, where TurboScribe costs a fraction as much.
Rev: when every word must be right
Rev is the pick when a transcript will be quoted, published or relied on as a record. Its human transcription costs $1.99 a minute, about $119 an hour, and is guaranteed 99%+ accurate and delivered in 12 hours or less, with rush and verbatim options; legal-formatted transcripts are priced by the page, from $2.25 (Rev pricing). No AI-only tool in this guide makes a guarantee like that.
Rev's AI side has changed. Its subscriptions are now sold as an "investigative intelligence platform" for legal and law enforcement teams: Essentials costs $29.99 per seat a month ($25.49 billed yearly) for 5,000 AI minutes in English and Spanish, and up to 10% off human transcripts. The free plan gives 45 AI minutes a month in English only. On the Artificial Analysis benchmark, Rev's AI model (tested through its API) scores 5.9%, behind most Whisper hosts and well behind ElevenLabs.
A cheaper route for a journalist on deadline: transcribe with an AI tool, then check each quote you use against the audio. Pay for human transcription when the whole document has to stand up, such as a legal record or a published Q&A. GoTranscript (pricing), the other large human-transcription service, charges $1.20 a minute for its 5-day service as of October 2026 and claims 99.4% accuracy; Rev stays the pick here for its 12-hour turnaround and accuracy guarantee.
Whisper: for developers and batch jobs
Whisper is OpenAI's speech recognition model, free and open source under the MIT license, and it's what many of the apps above run underneath. You install it with pip and ffmpeg and run it from the command line or Python (GitHub). The default turbo model needs about 6 GB of graphics memory and the large model about 10 GB.
Use Whisper directly if you're comfortable in a terminal and want to transcribe hundreds of files, build transcription into your own software, or keep everything on a Windows or Linux machine. Everyone else gets the same models with a friendlier interface in MacWhisper, Aiko or TurboScribe.
Descript: for podcasts and video
Descript is the pick when the transcript is a means to an edit. It transcribes audio and video, then lets you edit the recording by editing the text, so deleting a sentence cuts it from the episode. As of October 2026 the free plan includes 60 media minutes a month with 720p, watermarked exports; Hobbyist costs $24 a month ($16 billed yearly) for 10 hours and watermark-free 1080p; Creator costs $35 ($24 yearly) for 30 hours and 4K (Descript pricing).
Skip Descript if you only need the text. At $2.40 an hour on Hobbyist it costs more than TurboScribe for plain transcripts.
How accurate is AI transcription, and what goes wrong?
The leading AI models get about 2 to 5 words in 100 wrong on the Artificial Analysis benchmark, which mixes accents, specialist vocabulary and difficult recording conditions. On an hour-long interview that is still hundreds of words, so an AI transcript is a draft to check, not a record.
Whisper-based tools have one specific failure worth knowing. A 2024 study, "Careless Whisper", found that roughly 1% of transcripts from OpenAI's Whisper service, as it was in 2023, contained whole phrases or sentences nobody said, and 38% of those invented passages were harmful, such as false associations or violent language. They appeared most during long pauses. Newer models may do better, but the rule holds for any tool: check every quote against the audio before you publish it.
Check names, numbers and technical terms first, and give them to the tool in advance where it allows: ElevenLabs' web app takes up to 100 key terms, and Aiko has a word-replacement list for names it keeps getting wrong.
Can Gemini transcribe a recording?
Yes, for short clips. The Gemini app accepts audio uploads, but total audio is capped at 10 minutes, on the free plan and on Google AI Plus; Google AI Pro and Ultra raise that to 3 hours (Gemini Apps Help). You get text back in the chat, not a transcript you can play back and correct word by word, so it suits pulling notes from a recording more than producing a record of it.
For students, Gemini Notebook can record a lecture of up to an hour in its phone app and keep the transcript as a study source, discarding the audio (Gemini Notebook Help). Otherwise, transcribe with one of the tools above and add the text to a notebook.
Are meeting note takers like Otter the same thing?
No. Otter.ai, Granola and Fireflies.ai capture Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls as they happen and turn them into notes, and their plans are shaped around meetings, not files: Otter's free plan allows three file imports per account, ever, and Pro allows 10 a month (Otter pricing). If you already pay for Otter Pro and record a handful of interviews, it will do; otherwise a file transcriber is cheaper. For live calls, see the best AI meeting note takers.
What about Sonix, Notta and Happy Scribe?
These come up in assistants' answers; in the Perplexity answers checked for this guide, Sonix's own blog posts were among the most cited sources. None beats the picks above on price or free limits as of October 2026. Sonix charges $10 an hour pay as you go. Notta's free plan stops at 3 minutes per conversation. Happy Scribe offers a 10-minute free trial, then plans from $8.50 a month billed yearly, with $0.20 a minute top-ups ($12 an hour) on paid plans; its 150+ languages suit teams working across many languages.
How to choose
Start free with the recording you actually have. On a Mac, drop it into MacWhisper; on an iPhone, check the Voice Memos transcript; anywhere else, upload it to TurboScribe's free plan. If the result needs heavy fixing because of accents, noise or jargon, run a 10-minute stretch of the same file through ElevenLabs' free plan and compare. Pay for TurboScribe Unlimited once you regularly go past 90 minutes a day or 30 minutes a file, and pay Rev's humans only for transcripts that have to be right without your checking.
How this guide was made
Magpie Index considered 15 transcription tools and built-in features for turning a recording into text, using the makers' pricing pages, help centers and docs, the Artificial Analysis speech-to-text benchmark and a published study of Whisper errors, and asked Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude how they currently answer the question. Prices were rechecked on the makers' pages on October 22, 2026. The cost per hour of audio was calculated from published prices (script and inputs kept in the test library); no tool was signed up for or run for this guide. Research and writing were AI-assisted.
Built from the makers’ own documentation and pricing pages and from attributed outside sources. Magpie Index did not test these tools for this guide. Prices and plans were checked on the makers’ sites on October 22, 2026; they change often, so check before you buy. No tool paid to appear here, and links to tools carry no affiliate code. How Magpie Index works
