How to transcribe audio or video files

MacWhisper makes it very easy to transcribe audio or video files.

In short: drag your file into the app, and get a solid transcript within seconds.

Things I love:

1. Accurate, with speaker labels.
2. Fast (~10 seconds for 30 minutes of audio). ¹
3. Good UI for reading the transcript and checking against the original audio.
4. Fine UI for summarisation and AI chat with the transcript.
5. Transcribes locally.
6. Solid batch processing tool.
7. Cheap: 59 EUR for lifetime use of the software, then transcription is free.
8. Decent export options.

Things I don't love:

1. When you install, some of the default settings are wrong. Crucially: you should use the Parakeet V3 model, not Large v3 Turbo (it's much faster, and just as accurate).

2. As of October 2025, the last software update was in August 2025. That's a long time in AI time.

3. There's a "paste YouTube URL => get transcript" feature, which I would love. But it's totally broken.

4. There are lots of small bugs and rough edges (but the core transcription feature is solid).

5. It offers a "record meeting" feature but it consistently fails to detect the start and end of video calls.

6. The "dictation" feature is badly implemented, just ignore it for now.

7. If you want to tidy up a transcript (e.g. remove ums and ahs), you have to use a cloud-based model. So this doesn't fully solve the "transcribe very sensitive meetings locally" use case.

Overall, this is the best tool I've found, by a long-margin.

I previously recommended Fireflies. But it's much slower to use, and misses features I care about.

Thank you to Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier for the pointer.