How to Choose a Free Transcription Tool
Rather than a ranked list that goes stale, here is what to actually check before you trust a transcription tool with a recording.
The Scriptorium team ·
We are not going to publish a ranked list of competitors with prices in it. Pricing and limits in this category change every few months, a list like that is out of date within a quarter, and we would be marking our own homework. What follows is the checklist we would use ourselves, and it stays useful after the products change.
Full disclosure: Scriptorium is one of the tools this checklist applies to. Where the answer for this product is worth stating, it is stated plainly, including the parts where the answer is no.
1. Can you get the transcript out?
The first thing to check, and the one people check last. Some tools transcribe free and charge for the download. Before you spend half an hour correcting a transcript, confirm you can export it in a format you can use.
Check which formats: plain text, timestamped text, SRT, WebVTT, Markdown, JSON, CSV. Getting a transcript you cannot put anywhere is not much of a result.
2. What are the real limits?
Free tiers are limited by design and the limits are reasonable; what matters is whether they are stated up front. Look for the maximum file length, the maximum file size, and how many files you can do. A tool that reveals the cap after the upload has finished is wasting your time deliberately.
For this one: 15 minutes and 25 MB per file with no account, one file at a time. It is on the homepage and it is enforced by the same number.
3. What happens to your file?
Three questions worth asking any service, and the answers are often harder to find than they should be:
- Where is the file processed, and in which jurisdiction?
- How long is it kept, and can you delete it yourself?
- Is it used to train models?
For this one: files are uploaded to the Scriptorium server and transcribed there; they stay with your account until you delete them; free no-account files are deleted automatically after 24 hours; nothing is used for training. If the recording is genuinely confidential, the honest answer for any cloud service is to self-host instead.
4. Does it handle multiple speakers?
If your recordings are interviews, meetings or panel discussions, a transcript without speaker labels is much less useful, and retrofitting them by hand is tedious. Check whether it is included in the free tier or held back.
5. Can you edit it?
Every automatic transcript has errors. What differs is how painful fixing them is. The thing to look for is an editor where the audio plays in sync with the text and clicking a line jumps to that moment — without it, you are hunting through a recording for the passage you are trying to correct.
6. Does it support your language?
Most tools list supported languages, and support varies a lot in quality between the ones at the top of the list and the ones at the bottom. If you work in a language other than English, test it on your own audio rather than trusting the list. Also check whether it handles speakers switching between languages, which most tools do badly.
7. What is the accuracy on YOUR audio?
Ignore advertised accuracy percentages entirely. They are measured on clean benchmark recordings and predict nothing about a meeting room with four people.
Take three minutes of your hardest typical recording, run it through each tool you are considering, and count the errors that would actually matter. It takes twenty minutes across three tools and tells you more than every review you could read.
The categories of free
| Kind | Good for | Catch |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier on a product | Occasional work | Caps on length and volume. |
| Free trial | One deadline-driven project | Usually needs a card; remember to cancel. |
| Platform captions (YouTube) | Skimming public videos | Rough, no speaker labels. |
| Open-source, run locally | Bulk work, sensitive material | You set it up yourself. |
The last row is worth taking seriously if you are technical. Running an open speech model on your own machine is free, unlimited, and the only option where your audio genuinely never leaves your control.
When to stop using a free tier
When working around the limits costs more time than a subscription costs money. If you are splitting files weekly to stay under a cap, the free tier has stopped being free.