I reach for Speech to Text more often than I expected to. It's one of those small tools that quietly saves you time whenever you need to transcribe short audio clips to text with Whisper in your browser.
Transcribe short audio clips to text with Whisper in your browser. Speech recognition runs locally; audio is never uploaded to our server.
This guide walks through the whole thing: what it's for, how to use it step by step, a few tips I wish someone had told me earlier, and the questions people ask most.
The part I like most? Everything runs right in your browser. Nothing gets uploaded to a server, so your files stay on your own device the whole time.
The short version
Transcribe short audio clips to text with Whisper in your browser. It works with MP3, WAV, WebM, OGG, and M4A files, which covers what most people need day to day.
Because it does one job, it's fast. You open it, do the thing, and you're done — usually in under a minute.
Using it: the actual steps
You'll be through this in a couple of minutes. Here's how it goes:
- Upload a short audio file within the max duration shown. You can open it here: Speech to Text.
- Click Transcribe audio.
- Copy or download the transcript. That's it — you're done.
Real situations it's built for
Anyone wrangling messy text pasted from a PDF, email, or webpage.
Students and researchers who need quick counts, comparisons, or formatting fixes.
Writers and editors cleaning up or checking a draft before publishing.
A few things that genuinely help
These aren't rules, just things that have saved me time:
- Work in smaller chunks for very large inputs; it's easier to spot issues that way.
- Paste as plain text if formatting from Word or a webpage is causing weird characters.
- Try the default settings first. They're tuned for the most common case, and you can always tweak from there.
- If the result isn't quite right, change one setting at a time so you know what made the difference.
- Keep a copy of the original before you start — it takes a second and saves you if you want to redo it.
Where people usually go wrong
If something feels off, it's almost always one of these:
- Refreshing mid-process. Since the work happens in your browser, a reload starts you over.
- Feeding it a format it doesn't handle. Stick to MP3, WAV, WebM, OGG, and M4A and convert first if needed.
- Closing the tab too early. Let it finish before you navigate away, especially on slower connections.
- Uploading the wrong version of a file. Close old tabs and double-check the filename first.