Transcribe English audio to text, free

What makes English hard to transcribe

English has more training data behind it than any other language, so raw accuracy is rarely the problem. What trips transcription up is accent spread: an Indian, Scottish and Nigerian speaker in one meeting are further apart phonetically than many separate languages are from each other.

What your English transcript looks like

Punctuation and sentence casing are inferred, so you get paragraphs rather than an unbroken lowercase stream. Filler words are kept — delete them yourself if you want a clean read.

[00:00 → 00:04] Thanks everyone for joining. Let's start with last month's numbers.

[00:04 → 00:08] I'll share my screen so you can follow along.

An illustration of how English transcripts are formatted — script, punctuation and timestamps. Not the output of any particular recording.

How accurate to expect

English is the strongest case by a wide margin. Studio audio approaches human-level accuracy; the practical limits are overlapping speakers and heavy background noise rather than the language itself.

What usually needs fixing

1. 1 Industry acronyms and product names — the model hears the sounds correctly but has no way to know your internal spelling.
2. 2 Speaker overlap in group calls, where two voices in the same second collapse into one line.
3. 3 Homophone pairs in legal and medical contexts, where 'affect' and 'effect' carry real consequences.

Getting better results

• → Technical acronyms are the most common error source; a glossary pass beats re-recording.
• → For interviews with two distinct accents, transcribe the whole file at once rather than splitting — context helps the model.

Who transcribes English