Transcribe Audio to Text Free — and Generate SRT Subtitles in Your Browser

Transcribing audio used to mean either typing it out yourself, paying a per-minute transcription service, or uploading sensitive recordings to a website you barely trust. None of those options is great when you just need a quick, accurate transcript of an interview, a lecture, a podcast, or a video. There is now a far better way: you can transcribe audio to text free, right inside your browser, with the recording never leaving your device.

The BrowseryTools Audio & Video Transcriberruns OpenAI's Whisper speech-recognition model entirely on your own machine. You drop in an audio or video file, the tool converts the speech to text, and it generates subtitle files — SRT and VTT — that you can use anywhere. No account, no upload, no per-minute fee.

How On-Device Audio to Text Works

When you select a file, the tool reads it locally and decodes the audio using your browser's built-in Web Audio API. It mixes the audio down to a single mono channel and resamples it to 16kHz — exactly the format the Whisper model expects. Then it loads a small version of Whisper (whisper-base) directly in the browser tab and runs the audio through it.

The model itself is downloaded once from a content-delivery network the first time you use the tool, then cached by your browser so subsequent runs start instantly. From that point on, everything happens locally. If your browser supports WebGPU (recent Chrome, Edge, and Safari), the transcription runs on your GPU and is noticeably faster; otherwise it falls back to a WebAssembly engine that works everywhere.

The key point: your audio file is never sent to a server. There is no API call carrying your recording off your device. This matters enormously for interviews, medical or legal recordings, confidential meetings, and personal voice memos.

Generating Subtitles: SRT and VTT

A plain transcript is useful, but if you make videos you usually need timed subtitles. Whisper does not just return the words — it returns timestamped chunks, each with a start and end time. The transcriber turns those chunks into two standard subtitle formats:

SRT (SubRip) is the most widely supported subtitle format. It uses numbered cues with timestamps like 00:00:01,500 --> 00:00:03,000 and is accepted by YouTube, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, VLC, and almost every video editor and player.

VTT (WebVTT) is the web-native subtitle format used by the HTML5 <track> element. If you embed video on a website, VTT is the format you want for accessible, searchable captions.

You can copy either format to your clipboard or download it as a file. You also get the raw transcript as a .txt download for notes, blog drafts, or search.

What You Can Use It For

Subtitling your videos. Upload an MP4 or WebM, get an SRT or VTT, and import it straight into your editor or upload it alongside the video on YouTube. Captioned videos get more reach and are accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.

Turning podcasts into articles. Episodes are a goldmine of content. Transcribe an episode, clean up the text, and you have show notes, a blog post, and quotable highlights.

Interview and research notes. Journalists and researchers can transcribe recorded interviews without sending confidential conversations to a third-party service.

Meeting and lecture recap. Record a meeting or lecture and convert it to a searchable text transcript so you can find that one thing someone said without scrubbing the whole recording.

Accessibility. Anyone publishing audio or video should provide captions and transcripts. This tool makes that step free and fast.

Supported Files and Practical Tips

The transcriber accepts common audio and video formats: MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, MP4, and WebM. Because the browser decodes the audio directly, you can drop a video file in and it will pull out the audio track automatically — no need to extract the audio yourself.

A few tips for the best results. Clearer audio produces better transcripts, so a clean recording with minimal background noise will transcribe more accurately than a noisy one. Longer files take longer to process — the model works through the audio in 30-second windows with a small overlap so nothing gets cut off at the boundaries, and a one-hour file genuinely takes a few minutes on most machines. Keep the tab open and active while it works.

The whisper-base model is a balance of speed and accuracy. It handles clear English and many other languages well. For unusual accents, heavy background noise, or specialized vocabulary, expect to do a little manual cleanup — which is normal for any automatic transcription.

Why Free, Private, and In-Browser Matters

Most online transcription services charge by the minute and require you to upload your file to their servers. For casual use that is expensive, and for sensitive material it is a real privacy risk. Running the model in your browser removes both problems at once: it costs nothing, and your recording stays on your device the entire time.

Every tool on BrowseryTools follows the same philosophy — run locally, upload nothing, require no account, show no ads. The transcriber is one of the clearest examples of why that approach is worth it.

Try It Now

Open the Audio & Video Transcriber, drop in a file, and click Transcribe. In a moment you will have the full text plus downloadable SRT and VTT subtitles — all generated on your own device, for free. While you are there, explore the rest of BrowseryTools: a sentiment analyzer, a notepad, and dozens of other private, in-browser utilities.