AI has taken over the transcription industry, offering several services in addition to near-perfect accuracy such as summarization, taking notes and more. Some companies are already giving these incredible services free for everyone to use.

With an ever-growing nature, artificial intelligence is as close as ever to achieving perfect transcription accuracy, as well as speed. You can take advantage of this tech to have accurate transcripts and repurpose them for a variety of benefits.

The Role of AI in Transcription

Speech recognition technology is the basis of AI’s part in the transcription industry. Speech has nuance all over, especially when there are over 100+ languages spoken in the world. Similar sentences can have entirely different meanings, while completely opposite sentences can have the exact same meaning. These types of nuances are hard to understand, yet artificial intelligence has come a long way since its beginning, to now having almost perfect accuracy ratings.

Different audio quality also presents trouble when transcribing, leading to minor inaccuracies and problematic translations. Yet, with a little bit of editing, every person who has to transcribe a file for one reason or another should take advantage of AI transcription to save time and effort.

5 Free AI Transcription Tools

Every tool in this list has a free trial, yet for some advanced use you might need to pay a small fee or purchase a subscription. Although, every one of them is usable for free for you to try the advanced capabilities of free AI transcription.

🌟Maestra AI Live Transcription

Entirely free, Maestra’s live transcription tool leverages artificial intelligence to provide this accessibility tool to everyone in more than 125 languages.

Users can start the tool, choose their preferred language and let it to the rest. It is that simple. With a good audio quality, the transcription is close to perfect even though it does transcription in real time.

In addition, Maestra AI has an audio to text converter that provides an advanced version of the live transcription tool, with the exception of real-time transcription, where you can upload any audio file to transcribe it with superb accuracy and speed, to then proofread in the text editor and export in your preferred format.

🌠Otter

With a plan of 300 minutes per month, we can say that Otter is almost entirely free, if you aren’t going to transcribe hefty files all the time.

Also offering real-time transcription, particularly used for meetings, Otter also has a premium plan that has unlimited transcription and other features such as custom vocabulary and automatic keyword generation.

⭐Temi

Temi is another player in the AI transcription field, providing accurate transcription services. Although it isn’t entirely free, it has a trial and a relatively cheap payment model. With 45 minutes of free transcription, for most users it will be more than enough.

Now accompanied by Rev, another big player in the transcription industry, Temi provides quality transcriptions for free and additional premium features behind a paywall that is quite affordable.

💫Auphonic

Auphonic is an audio post-production platform that also offers AI transcription. For users who care about the quality of their audio and know how to work through an audio file, Auphonic is a good use case that also has free AI transcription.

With 2 hours of audio processing per month for free, which includes transcription, Auphonic is a great free alternative with a bit of extra audio engineering involved. Although 2 hours can be enough for most, after that you will need to pay a small fee to continue.

✨Google Voice Typing

Well, when it comes to being completely free, no tool is free forever except Maestra or Google. With a similar approach, Google Docs Voice Typing uses speech recognition technology to convert live audio to text on a Google Docs file.

It is a simple way to transcribe files in real-time, and completely for free. The one problem with it is that you can not transcribe uploaded files, which is most of the current transcription demand.

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Benefits of AI Transcription

It feels like with free tools come poor-quality solutions, but in a competitive market, free tools are good way to stay alive and ahead. Many platforms are providing free AI transcription tools every day, and you can take advantage of these tools to receive several benefits.

Incredibly Efficient

With artificial intelligence dipping its toes and taking over the transcription field, the speed and the accuracy of transcriptions is better than ever. You can now transcribe hours of audio content in minutes nad only need to proofread a little bit to achieve %100 accuracy. Even without any editing, these tools we provided in the list have near-perfect accuracy, eliminating the need to do human-editing on most transcription related works.

Affordable and Accessible

All of the tools provided are free to use, almost all of them to an extent, but even their full capabilities come at an affordable cost. With only around $10 or so, users can take advantage of advanced features to unlock the full potential of AI transcription.

Transcripts provide accessibility to hearing-impared audiences, allowing them to fully comprehend any content. Also, some people consume content on mute, and others can have various difficulties surrounding audio content. Therefore, having transcripts is always a good idea, especially when it is free.

Multilingual Nuance

Perhaps the most complex issue when it comes to AI and transcription, multilingual nuance and cultural references are quite difficult do decypher, even to the human ear. But the ever-growing nature of AI is taking huge steps in this area, transcribing audio files with contextual accuracy. Even though there can be minor inaccuracies, it will surely be perfect in the near future.