The best transcription apps in 2026 for files, calls and privacy

The best transcription apps turn speech into text you can search, quote and edit, but they are built for different jobs. Some transcribe meetings as they happen, some take a pile of recorded files, some let a person check every word, and some run entirely on your own computer so the audio is never uploaded to be transcribed. Picking well starts with what you record and where you want that recording to go.

This guide compares ten transcription apps, with prices from each company's own page as of September 2026, and says who each one is for.

The quick answer

• Otter.ai: the best for meetings, with live transcripts and a free plan of 300 minutes a month.
• Rev: the best when accuracy must be checked by a person.
• Descript: the best for editing audio and video by editing the text.
• TurboScribe: the best value for many long files.
• Happy Scribe: the best for subtitles and the longest list of languages.
• Notta: the best on your phone and for bilingual conversations.
• MacWhisper: the best private transcription on a Mac, for a one-time price.
• Buzz: the best free, open-source option for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Barside: the best for private call transcripts inside your notes, on Windows, Linux and Mac.
• Microsoft Word Transcribe: the best if you already pay for Microsoft 365.

How we chose

We compared the apps on the questions people actually have before they upload an hour of audio:

• Input. Live meetings, recorded files, your microphone, or your computer's own audio.
• Where it runs. On the company's servers, or on your computer with a local speech model.
• Output. Speaker labels, timestamps, languages, export formats and editing.
• Cost. The free plan's real limit and the price per month or per minute, from the official pricing pages as of September 2026.
• Platforms. Web, Windows, Mac, Linux and phones.

We did not invent accuracy scores. Accuracy depends heavily on the recording itself, so we note what each company states and where a person checks the text.

The best transcription apps at a glance

The 10 best transcription apps, reviewed

1. Otter.ai

Otter.ai transcribes meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet as they happen, labels speakers, and lets you ask its AI chat about what was said. It also takes uploaded audio and video files. It runs on the web, on iPhone and Android, and as a desktop app for Mac and Windows, and it transcribes English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified).

Best for: meetings and interviews where you want to read along live.

Strengths:

• A live transcript with speaker labels that you can search and share after the call.
• A free plan that is enough to try it properly: 300 transcription minutes a month.
• Team vocabulary on Pro, so names and jargon come out right more often.

Limits: Basic stops each conversation at 30 minutes and allows 3 file imports in total. Pro allows 10 imports a month and 90 minutes per meeting. Six languages is fewer than most file services support.

Price (as of September 2026): Basic is free. Pro is US$16.99 a month, or US$8.33 a month billed yearly. Business is US$30, or US$19.99 billed yearly, with meetings up to 4 hours. For a deeper comparison, see the Otter.ai alternative guide and the list of the best AI meeting assistants.

2. Rev

Rev sells both AI transcription and transcripts written by people. Its human transcription costs US$1.99 a minute, and Rev states that it is 99%+ accurate. It also offers human captions, legal transcripts and subtitles in 17 languages, and mobile apps for recording interviews in the field.

Best for: journalists, researchers and legal teams who need text a person has checked.

Strengths:

• Human transcription at a published price per minute, with no subscription needed.
• AI plans with thousands of minutes: 5,000 per user a month on Essentials, 10,000 on Pro.
• 37+ languages on Pro, and up to 15% off human work for subscribers.

Limits: the free plan has 45 AI minutes a month. Essentials transcribes English and Spanish only. Human work costs far more than AI for long recordings.

Price (as of September 2026): Free. Essentials is US$29.99 per seat a month, or US$25.49 a month billed yearly. Pro is US$59.99, or US$47.99 billed yearly. Human transcription is US$1.99 a minute.

3. Descript

Descript transcribes your audio or video and lets you edit the recording by editing the text: delete a sentence in the transcript and it is gone from the video. It runs on Mac (macOS 14 or later), Windows 11 and the web, and transcribes 25 languages.

Best for: podcasters, video creators and anyone who records and then edits.

Strengths:

• Text-based editing on every plan, including the free one.
• AI tools that run on monthly AI credits. Paid plans add AI speech with your own voice clone, and Creator adds 4K export.
• Plans with 10 to 40 media hours a month.

Limits: the free plan covers 60 minutes of media a month and 100 AI credits once. If you only need a transcript, a dedicated service costs less.

Price (as of September 2026): Free. Hobbyist is US$16 a month billed yearly, or US$24 monthly (10 media hours). Creator is US$24 billed yearly, or US$35 monthly (30 hours). Business is US$50 billed yearly, or US$65 monthly.

If you edit talks into short vertical videos, Barside also turns long videos into short clips on your computer, with editing by text and animated captions.

4. TurboScribe

TurboScribe is a web service built on Whisper that transcribes uploaded audio and video in 98+ languages. Its paid plan is a flat price with no overall cap on how much one person transcribes.

Best for: students, researchers and podcasters with many long recordings.

Strengths:

• A flat monthly price instead of a minute budget.
• Long files: up to 10 hours and 5 GB each on the paid plan, 50 uploads at a time.
• Three free transcripts every day to try it.

Limits: free files can be up to 30 minutes, one upload at a time, and wait longer in line. It is for files, not live meetings. Your audio is uploaded to its servers.

Price (as of September 2026): Free for 3 files a day. TurboScribe Unlimited is US$10 a month billed yearly, or US$20 monthly, for one person.

5. Happy Scribe

Happy Scribe transcribes and subtitles in 150+ languages, translates into 80+, and sells human proofreading in 65+ languages.

Best for: subtitles, translation and languages other apps do not cover.

Strengths:

• The widest language list here for AI transcription.
• Human proofreading on top of the AI draft, from US$2.00 a minute.
• Plans sized in minutes, from 120 to 6,000 a month.

Limits: the free plan is a 10-minute trial, with recordings up to 45 minutes. Basic allows 90 minutes per recording and one seat.

Price (as of September 2026): Basic is US$17 a month, or US$8.50 billed yearly (120 minutes a month). Pro is US$29, or US$19 billed yearly (600 minutes, 3 seats). Business is US$89, or US$59 billed yearly.

6. Notta

Notta transcribes meetings and recordings from the web, iPhone and Android apps, a Chrome extension and desktop apps for Mac and Windows, with bilingual transcription and transcript translation.

Best for: people who record on their phone, and conversations that switch between two languages.

Strengths:

• Apps on every common platform, including a Chrome extension, and desktop apps that record without a bot.
• Transcript translation on Pro, and bilingual transcription: a few free uses a month, or a paid add-on for more.
• Pro allows recordings up to 5 hours.

Limits: the free plan has 120 minutes a month but only 3 minutes per conversation, so it is a trial more than a plan. Custom vocabulary covers English and Japanese. Bilingual transcription beyond the few free uses needs a paid add-on.

Price (as of September 2026): Free. Pro is US$13.49 a month, or US$8.17 a month billed yearly (1,800 minutes a month). Business is US$27.99 per seat, or US$16.67 billed yearly. The bilingual transcription and translation add-on is US$15 a month, or US$9 a month billed yearly.

7. MacWhisper

MacWhisper transcribes on your Mac with local models (Whisper, Parakeet and others), so sensitive audio never leaves the computer. It reads MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, Opus, MOV and MP4 files in over 100 languages, and it can record meetings in Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, Chime, Discord and other apps, starting and stopping by itself.

Best for: Mac users who want private transcripts and no subscription.

Strengths: local processing, a one-time price, automatic meeting recording, and capture of audio from other apps.

Limits: Mac only, and how fast a long file finishes depends on your Mac. The team and sharing features of cloud services are not its focus.

Price (as of September 2026): a free version, and MacWhisper Pro for €64 per license, paid once, with lifetime updates (the price we saw on macwhisper.com; your local price may differ).

8. Buzz

Buzz is a free, open-source (MIT) app that transcribes and translates audio offline with OpenAI's Whisper. It runs on Windows, on Macs with Apple silicon, and on Linux as a Flatpak, a Snap or an AppImage.

Best for: anyone who wants free, private transcription of files on any desktop system.

Strengths:

• Free, open source and offline: no account, no upload, no minute limits.
• Live transcription from your microphone, with a presentation window.
• Exports to TXT, SRT, VTT and CSV, so subtitles are one step away.

Limits: you manage models and settings yourself. Buzz's own documentation calls the default Whisper model resource-intensive and suggests smaller models for live transcription. It focuses on transcription and translation, not on meeting notes or teamwork.

Price (as of September 2026): free. A separate paid version, Buzz on macOS, is sold in the Mac App Store.

9. Barside

Barside is a free desktop app for notes, tasks and meetings that keeps your library on your computer. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac. Its transcription is built for one job: turning your calls and meetings into searchable notes, privately.

What it transcribes:

• Calls. Choose Transcribe a call in the Assistant or on the desktop bar, then Start recording. Barside records your microphone and your computer's audio, writes them down in 30-second pieces and adds each line to a note with its time and a You or Others label, like [03:12] You: …. Choose Stop & save when the call ends. The full guide is transcribe calls on your computer.
• Meetings. In Barside's own video meetings, live captions are written on each person's computer, and the meeting note keeps the transcript and chat.
• Videos. Add a video to a note and choose Make clips: Barside writes down every word so you can cut the video by its text.
• Voice commands. The same engine turns what you say to the assistant into text, and powers Hey Barside voice commands.

Strengths:

• Speech turns into text on your computer with Whisper. It is a one-time download of about 150 MB and needs no AI key and no account.
• English is built in. Assistant settings → Speech language adds automatic detection and 34 more languages with a one-time 141 MB download.
• Each non-silent 30-second piece of a call is saved in the note as a WAV file before it is transcribed, so if something fails, the audio is still there.
• Transcripts become part of your notes: search finds them, and the AI you connect can turn them into a summary, decisions and tasks with meeting follow-up.

Limits: Barside does not transcribe audio-only files, such as an MP3 interview you already have; for those, use Buzz, MacWhisper or TurboScribe. Speakers are labelled only You and Others, based on which audio channel is louder, and without headphones a quick reply can get the wrong label. There are no subtitle exports for transcripts and no phone app. In Barside for Mac, a call's computer audio needs macOS 14.2 or later; on older versions, Barside records the microphone only.

Price: free. Barside Plus (US$20 a month or US$200 a year, plus sales tax) is optional and not needed for transcription.

10. Microsoft Word Transcribe

Word's Transcribe turns a recording into text inside your document. You can record directly in Word while you take notes, or upload a WAV, MP4, M4A or MP3 file.

Best for: Microsoft 365 subscribers who want transcripts next to their documents.

Strengths: no extra app or account, the transcript lands where you write, and speakers are separated as Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, which you can rename.

Limits: it is in Word for the web and Word for Microsoft 365 on Windows, and it needs an active Microsoft 365 subscription. Uploads are limited to 300 minutes a month, or 30,000 with a Copilot license. Recordings are saved to your OneDrive and transcribed online, so the speed depends on your connection.

Price (as of September 2026): included with Microsoft 365 plans that have Word.

Cloud or your computer: where transcription happens

Every app in this list runs a speech model somewhere. That choice decides your privacy, your limits and your speed.

Cloud services (Otter.ai, Rev, TurboScribe, Happy Scribe, Notta and Word's Transcribe) upload your audio and transcribe it on their servers. You get fast results on any device, collaboration and extras such as summaries and translation. In exchange, the recording lives on someone else's computer under their policy, and most plans cap minutes or hours.

Local apps (MacWhisper, Buzz, Barside) run the model on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded to transcribe it, and there is no minute limit, because you supply the processing power. A long file takes longer on an older laptop, and team features are few.

For interviews under an agreement, medical or legal conversations, or anything you would not email to a stranger, local transcription removes a whole category of risk. Barside's privacy page explains what it keeps and where.

How to choose a transcription app

• You record meetings: Otter.ai for live transcripts, or see the best AI meeting assistants for tools that also write summaries.
• Every word must be right: Rev's human transcription, or Happy Scribe with human proofreading.
• You edit what you record: Descript.
• You have many long files: TurboScribe Unlimited, or Buzz if you would rather not upload them.
• You need subtitles in many languages: Happy Scribe, or Buzz for SRT and VTT files made offline.
• You work on a Mac and want privacy: MacWhisper.
• You work on Windows or Linux and want free, private transcripts of calls in your notes: Barside, and Barside for Mac.
• You already pay for Microsoft 365: try Word's Transcribe before buying anything.

Tips for better transcripts with any app

1. Get the microphone close. A headset or a microphone near the speaker beats a laptop microphone across the room.
2. Record in a quiet room. Fans, music and echo cost more accuracy than any setting can win back.
3. Set the language. If you know it, choose it instead of relying on automatic detection.
4. Keep the original audio. You will want it to check a quote, and some apps let you play a line from its timestamp.
5. Proofread names and numbers. These are where every engine slips. Use custom vocabulary where the app offers it.
6. Ask before you record. Tell people, and stop if anyone objects. In some places the law requires everyone's consent.

To see how Barside handles a call from recording to follow-up, read how it can transcribe calls on your computer, then how meeting follow-up turns the transcript into tasks.