Free Online Transcription Software: 7 Tools, Real Limits

Takeaway. Most free transcription tiers are metered in two dimensions at once, a monthly minute pool and a per-session cap, and hitting either one stops you mid-recording.
Takeaway. Free meeting recorders and free file transcribers are different products. Otter's free tier gives you three lifetime file imports; Word's Transcribe takes files but will not sit in a live call.
Takeaway. The only genuinely uncapped options run the model on your own machine. meetergo Log and OpenAI Whisper have no minute pool because nothing is metered on a server.
Takeaway. Free almost always means your audio is uploaded, stored and used under someone else's retention policy. That is the part the minute count does not tell you.
Takeaway. Language coverage collapses on free tiers faster than minutes do. Otter's free plan covers six languages; the local-model options cover 40 to 99.

Nearly every listicle on page one for this search is published by a transcription vendor that ranks itself first. The numbers are rarely wrong, just selectively arranged. What gets left out is the second cap, the one that bites, and what happens to the recording afterwards.

This comparison is organised around the things that actually decide whether a free tier survives contact with real work: how many minutes you get per month, how long a single recording can run before it is cut, whether you can upload a file at all, how many languages are covered, which export formats you get, and where the audio is processed. All figures below were checked on 17 September 2026 against each tool's own pricing or documentation page.

The free tiers at a glance

Read the second column twice. A monthly pool and a per-session cap are separate limits. Otter's 300 minutes sound generous until a 50-minute interview gets truncated at 30.

What "free" actually buys you in this category

Free transcription splits into three business models, and knowing which one you are looking at predicts the limits before you read them.

Metered freemium. The vendor runs the model on their servers, so every minute costs them money. Otter and Happy Scribe both stack a session cap on top of the monthly pool, so a single long file cannot drain the allowance in one go.

Bundled into something you already pay for. Transcribe in Word costs nothing at the point of use but requires an active Microsoft 365 subscription, so the honest description is included, not free. Google Docs voice typing is the closest thing to genuinely free here, and pays for that by only listening to a live microphone.

Open weights running locally. The only model with no meter at all.

Tip. Work out which model you are dealing with before you compare minute counts. A 10-minute trial and a 300-minute monthly pool are not the same unit, and no comparison table makes them comparable. Whisper's code and weights are released under the MIT licence, and meetergo Log packages a local engine into a desktop app. Nothing is uploaded, so nothing is counted. The cost moves from a subscription to your own CPU time and disk space.

That third category is also where the retention question answers itself. In a long r/podcasting thread on the subject, the recurring theme is not accuracy but the point at which each recommendation starts asking for a card, which is what a session cap is designed to produce. A second thread in the same subreddit converges on the same split between metered cloud tools and local ones.

meetergo Log

meetergo Log is a desktop transcription app from meetergo, a Cologne-built platform whose wider product covers scheduling, video meetings, CRM and e-signatures across talent, sales, consulting and other verticals. The differentiator here is architectural rather than featural: transcription runs on your own machine using a local Whisper or Parakeet model, so there is no upload step, no server-side meter and no minute pool to exhaust. For interviews and internal meetings that is the difference between planning around a 30-minute cap and not thinking about caps at all.

Local transcription with no account

Recording, transcription, summaries, full-text search and export work without creating an account. The app picks between a local Whisper or Parakeet model and keeps both the audio and the transcript on disk, which is why there is no monthly allowance to track.

Push-to-talk dictation

Holding a keyboard shortcut opens the microphone, transcribes locally and pastes the result into whatever field you are in, up to two minutes per dictation. The clipboard is restored afterwards, so the feature does not quietly overwrite what you had copied.

No bot in the call

Because the app captures system audio on your machine, nothing joins the meeting as a visible participant. Other attendees see no third-party bot in the roster, which removes the awkward moment that cloud notetakers create.

40+ languages with auto-detection

Language is detected automatically across 40+ languages, and because the model is local the language list does not shrink on the free tier the way it does on metered plans.

Pricing

Customer reviews

meetergo holds 4.79 out of 5 across 95 reviews on OMR Reviews (checked 4 September 2026), which covers the whole platform rather than Log specifically. Log itself is recent enough that it has no standalone review corpus yet, so treat the platform score as context, not as a verdict on the transcription app.

Where meetergo Log shines

• No minute pool, because nothing is metered server-side
• No account needed to transcribe
• Audio and transcripts never leave the machine
• Works offline, including on a plane or a train
• No visible bot joins the meeting

Where meetergo Log falls short

• Speaker diarization sits on the paid Light tier, not on free
• Custom summary templates also require Light
• macOS and Windows only; Linux has not shipped
• A device-local app gives no central admin console or org-wide audit log
• Transcription speed depends on your own hardware

Who it is for

anyone transcribing confidential interviews, client calls or internal meetings who wants the recording to stay on their own machine, and who would rather spend CPU time than manage a minute budget.

Otter.ai

Otter.ai is a meeting-first transcription service built around live capture: a bot joins the call, transcribes as people speak, and produces a shared summary afterwards. The free Basic tier is where most people meet it, and it is metered tightly. You get 300 transcription minutes a month with a 30-minute cap on any single conversation, and only 3 lifetime audio or video file imports, which effectively means uploaded files are a demo rather than a workflow. Free-tier language coverage is limited to English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, exports are restricted to mp3 and txt, and the audio is processed and retained in Otter's cloud under its own policy. Anyone transcribing recordings rather than live calls will run out of imports on day one.

Key features

• Live transcription with a bot that joins the meeting
• Automatic meeting summaries
• Speaker identification
• Shared workspace with transcript comments

Pricing

(All figures checked 17 September 2026.)

Customer reviews

Otter scores 4.4 out of 5 across 103 reviews on Capterra, with ease of use at 4.6 and customer service at 4.0. The two criticisms that recur in the Capterra review set are accuracy dropping sharply with background noise or non-native accents, and weak action-item detection that still leaves reviewers reading the full transcript.

Where Otter shines

• Live transcription is genuinely fast
• Sharing and commenting on transcripts is well built
• Meeting summaries land in the workspace automatically

Where Otter falls short

• Three lifetime file imports on free
• 30-minute session cap truncates most interviews
• Six languages on the free tier
• Export limited to mp3 and txt without a paid plan
• Recording stored in the vendor's cloud

Who it is for

teams that live in recurring video calls, accept a bot in the room, and treat transcription as a live-meeting feature rather than a file-processing job. If you are weighing it against other tools in this category, the Otter alternatives comparison and the Otter pricing breakdown go deeper on the tiers.

Happy Scribe

Happy Scribe sells transcription, subtitling and translation as one service, with a human-proofreading layer on top of the machine output. Its free entry point is smaller than it looks: the AI transcription trial is 10 minutes, and the unlimited part applies to meeting recordings of up to 45 minutes each, not to uploaded files. Free language coverage is broad at 60+ languages and dialects, and exports include DOCX, TXT, SRT and a watermarked MP4. Audio is processed and stored in the vendor's cloud, and the proofreading option means files may be handled by people as well as models, which is worth reading closely before uploading anything confidential.

Key features

• AI transcription plus optional human proofreading
• Subtitle generation with SRT export
• Translation across a large language set
• Recording capture from Google Meet, Zoom and Teams

Pricing

(Checked 17 September 2026. The subscription rows are omitted deliberately: the published monthly and annual figures were inconsistent at the time of checking, and a wrong price is worse than a missing one.)

Customer reviews

No rating with a verifiable sample size was obtainable for Happy Scribe during this round of checks, so no score is quoted here. A rating without its review count is not evidence, and inventing one would be worse than the gap.

Where Happy Scribe shines

• 60+ languages on the free tier
• Subtitle-shaped exports out of the box, useful for video transcription work
• Human proofreading available when machine output is not enough

Where Happy Scribe falls short

• The AI trial is 10 minutes, not a recurring monthly pool
• Uploaded files consume the trial rather than the meeting allowance
• MP4 export is watermarked on free
• Per-minute overage pricing makes cost hard to predict
• Files are processed in the vendor's cloud

Who it is for

subtitling and multilingual work where SRT output matters more than an uncapped free allowance.

Microsoft Word Transcribe

Word's built-in Transcribe converts an uploaded recording into a timestamped, speaker-separated transcript inside the document you are already writing in, which removes the copy-paste step entirely. The honest framing is that it is included rather than free: the feature requires an active Microsoft 365 subscription, and Microsoft states it is currently only available in Word for Microsoft 365 on Windows in commercial tenants and in Word for the web. The allowance is 300 minutes of uploaded audio per month for standard subscribers, rising to 30,000 minutes with a Microsoft Copilot licence. Supported formats are .wav, .mp4, .m4a and .mp3, coverage spans 80+ locales, and recordings are stored in a Transcribed Files folder on OneDrive, so the audio does leave your machine even though the interface does not look like a web upload.

Key features

• Transcript appears inside the Word document
• Speaker separation with timestamps
• Playback synced to the transcript text
• Recordings archived automatically to OneDrive

Pricing

(Checked 17 September 2026.)

Customer reviews

Transcribe is a feature inside Word rather than a separately reviewed product, so there is no standalone rating with a review count to cite. Feedback lives in Microsoft's own support channels, which is not an independent sample.

Where Word Transcribe shines

• 300 minutes a month is a real working allowance
• No new tool to learn if Word is already the destination
• 80+ locales
• Speaker separation on uploaded files

Where Word Transcribe falls short

• Requires a paid Microsoft 365 subscription
• Windows commercial tenants and Word for the web only
• Recordings land in OneDrive by default
• Cannot sit in a live meeting and capture it
• Four supported audio formats, so conversions are often needed

Who it is for

organisations already paying for Microsoft 365 that transcribe recorded files and want the output to land directly in a document, then shape it with a meeting minutes template. Where the meeting itself is the source, a dedicated meeting transcription tool fits better.

OpenAI Whisper

Whisper is the open-weights speech recognition model most of this category is quietly built on. Code and weights are released under the MIT licence, so running it costs nothing and is capped only by your hardware. Model sizes run from tiny at 39 M parameters and roughly 1 GB of VRAM up to large at 1550 M parameters and around 10 GB, with a turbo variant at 809 M that trades a little accuracy for roughly eight times the speed of large. It covers 99 languages, exports to TXT, VTT, SRT, TSV and JSON, and once the model is downloaded it runs fully offline. The catch is the setup: it expects Python 3.9 or thereabouts plus the ffmpeg command-line tool, and the interface is a terminal.

Key features

• MIT-licensed model weights and code
• Six model sizes trading accuracy against speed
• 99 languages
• Five export formats including subtitle timings

Pricing

(Checked 17 September 2026.)

Customer reviews

Whisper is a code repository rather than a commercial product, so it carries no review score with a sample size. Its adoption signal is that most of the free tools in this comparison run a Whisper derivative underneath.

Where Whisper shines

• Genuinely unlimited, with no meter anywhere
• 99 languages, none of them gated
• Runs entirely offline after the model download
• Subtitle-ready export formats

Where Whisper falls short

• Command-line only, with a Python and ffmpeg install first
• No speaker diarization without extra tooling
• Large models want around 10 GB of VRAM
• No meeting capture, summaries or search
• Long files on modest hardware take real time

Who it is for

technical users who want maximum control and zero cost and do not mind a terminal. If you want the same local processing without the setup, a packaged desktop app covers the same ground.

Nuremberg-hosted

Transcribe meetings without uploading the audio.

Runs on your deviceNo minute capsFree, no account

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Sarah NowakManaging Director · Intro call · 30 min09:0010:3014:00

Nuremberg-hosted

Transcribe meetings without uploading the audio.

Runs on your deviceNo minute capsFree, no account

Get meetergo Log

Two smaller options worth knowing

oTranscribe is a free, MIT-licensed web app for transcribing interviews by hand. It does no speech recognition at all; it gives you keyboard-driven playback control, autosave every second, and export to Markdown, plain text, .otr and Google Drive. The page is explicit that your audio file and transcript never leave your computer. For a researcher who needs a verbatim, human-accurate transcript of a difficult recording, hand-typing with good playback controls still beats correcting a machine draft.

Google Docs voice typing is live dictation inside a Google Doc, supported in current versions of Chrome, Edge and Safari, across 130+ languages and variants. It transcribes only what the microphone hears in real time, so it cannot process a recording you already have. Played through speakers into a microphone it degrades badly. As a free dictation surface it is hard to beat; as transcription software it is the wrong tool.

How to pick without getting caught by the second cap

Independent testing is thin in this category, but it exists: a long-running review of paid transcription services is one of the few page-one results not published by a transcription vendor, and it reaches the same split between machine speed and human accuracy. The consent question is the one most comparisons skip. If the recording contains personal data about people in the EU, uploading it to a US-hosted service is a transfer with its own paperwork, and the CLOUD Act's reach over US-parented providers is why that paperwork exists. Local processing removes the transfer rather than documenting it, which is the practical end of the broader data sovereignty argument. The practical obligations around recording and summarising meetings are covered in more depth in our guide to AI meeting notes and GDPR.

Tip. If you are unsure how much you actually transcribe, run one month on a capped free tier and count how often you hit the session limit rather than the monthly one. That number picks the tool for you.

FAQ

Heads-up. Free-tier numbers in this category change without notice. Every figure below was checked on 17 September 2026 against the vendor's own page.

Is Google Transcribe free?

Google Docs voice typing is free with a Google account and works in current Chrome, Edge and Safari. It covers 130+ languages and variants but only transcribes live microphone input, so it cannot process an audio file you already have. Google's paid Speech-to-Text API handles files, and that is billed per minute.

Is Otter.ai completely free?

No. Otter's Basic plan is free but capped at 300 transcription minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation, three lifetime file imports and six languages, with exports limited to mp3 and txt (checked 17 September 2026). Paid tiers start at $8.33 per user per month billed annually.

Can ChatGPT transcribe audio for free?

ChatGPT's free tier accepts voice input but is not built for transcribing uploaded recordings, and file-handling limits change often. For audio files, the underlying Whisper model run locally is free and uncapped, while the hosted API version is billed per minute of audio.

What is the best free transcription software for long recordings?

Anything that runs the model locally, because there is no session cap to hit. meetergo Log and a local Whisper install both transcribe recordings of any length at no cost, limited only by how fast your machine works through the file.

Is it legal to transcribe audio without permission?

It depends on where everyone is. Some jurisdictions require all parties to consent to a recording, others only one. Under GDPR, recording a call that contains personal data needs a lawful basis and a disclosure to participants before you start, regardless of which tool you use.

The short version

If your recordings are short, occasional and not sensitive, a metered cloud tier is fine and Otter is the easiest starting point. If you already pay for Microsoft 365, the 300 minutes inside Word are the cheapest capacity you will find. If the recordings are long, confidential, or simply frequent enough that a meter becomes annoying, the local-processing options are the only ones that stop the problem rather than rationing it, and the difference between Whisper and a packaged app like meetergo Log is mostly how much terminal you want in your day.

The single question that sorts this list is not which tool is most accurate. It is whether you would be comfortable with the recording sitting on someone else's server for as long as their retention policy says. If the answer is no, the shortlist is two tools long.

Sources

All figures were read on 17 September 2026 unless a different date is given. Free-tier limits and prices change; check them before you commit.

• Otter.ai plans and free-tier limits, otter.ai/pricing
• Happy Scribe free trial, credits and proofreading rates, happyscribe.com/pricing
• Microsoft, Transcribe your recordings (allowance, formats, availability, OneDrive storage), support.microsoft.com
• OpenAI Whisper repository (MIT licence, model sizes, languages, output formats), github.com/openai/whisper
• oTranscribe (manual transcription, local file handling, exports), otranscribe.com
• Google, Type with your voice (browser support, live dictation only), support.google.com
• Capterra, Otter reviews, 4.4 out of 5 across 103 reviews, capterra.com
• OMR Reviews, meetergo, 4.79 out of 5 across 95 reviews (checked 4 September 2026), omr.com
• meetergo Log plans and free-tier scope, meetergo.com/en/apps/ai-notes

Nuremberg-hosted

Keep the recording on your own machine.

Local transcription40+ languagesFree, no account needed

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Sarah NowakManaging Director · Intro call · 30 min09:0010:3014:00

Nuremberg-hosted

Keep the recording on your own machine.

Local transcription40+ languagesFree, no account needed

Start with meetergo Log