Transcribe voice notes for writers

How people use it

• ·Speaking a rough first draft of a chapter or an article and editing the text afterwards.
• ·Capturing story ideas, outlines and character notes while away from the desk.
• ·Interviewing a relative for a memoir or a family history and keeping the words; see old recordings for tapes.
• ·Turning a talk or a rehearsal you recorded into text you can rework.

From voice to page

1. Record on your phone's voice memo app or a recorder. Close to the mouth and out of the wind makes the biggest difference. To record straight from the browser instead, use the record button in the upload box where your browser allows it.
2. Upload the file above. Phone formats such as M4A work as they are; there is no need to convert.
3. Read the draft and speak-to-text habits show up: run-on sentences, a name spelled three ways, an invented word where you mumbled. Fix them as you would in any rough draft.
4. Take out filler words with the free filler word remover if you want a cleaner first read, and strip times with the timestamp remover.
5. Export plain text or Markdown and paste it into your writing app.

What to expect from the text

Spoken language does not read like written language, and the transcript keeps what you said. It will give you sentences and punctuation, but not structure or style: no paragraphs shaped like chapters, no summary, no rewriting. Names of characters, places and invented words are the most likely to be wrong, so keep a list of them. Long monologues come back as one stream of lines, and you decide where the paragraphs break.

Keeping your work private

Unpublished ideas deserve care. Uploading sends the audio to our server. Files from the no-account preview are deleted automatically; with an account the file and transcript stay until you delete them, and the privacy page says uploads are not used to train anything. If you would rather the audio never left your computer, the self-hosted version runs the same transcription on your own machine.

Which plan fits

Without an account you can try one file at a time, up to 15 minutes and 25 MB, 3 tries a day, with nothing to sign up for. Pro is $9.99 a month for 600 transcription minutes a month (10 hours of audio), with files up to 500 MB and 120 minutes each. Pro+ is $19.99 a month for 2,500 minutes a month, files up to 1 GB and 180 minutes each, and priority processing when the queue is busy. Paid plans are billed monthly in US dollars with PayPal and can be cancelled from your Billing page; transcripts you already made are not deleted when a plan ends.

Thirty minutes of voice notes a day is about 900 minutes a month, which is more than Pro's 600 and inside Pro+'s 2,500; a few notes a week fit inside a free account's allowance.