Legal transcription software: where automatic speech recognition stops
8 min Legal transcription software gives you a searchable draft of a deposition or hearing, not a certified transcript. Here is where the line sits.
Free · no signup · no upload
Your audio never leaves your browser.
Transcription runs on your own computer. Drop a file in, watch the text appear, download TXT, SRT or VTT. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is metered.
Drop an audio or video file
MP3 · WAV · M4A · FLAC · OGG · MP4 · MOV · WEBM · MKV · AVI
Processed on this device. No length limit.
This browser cannot run the transcriber yet.
Nothing was downloaded. The tool works on desktop Chrome or Edge 113 or newer with a graphics card that supports WebGPU. Firefox, Safari and phones are next on the list.
0 files
uploaded, ever
No limit
on length or minutes
3 formats
TXT · SRT · VTT
0%
First lines coming through
Transcript
That did not work.
Nothing was uploaded. If this keeps happening, tell us which browser and file type you used.
Why local
Three things most free transcribers get wrong.
01
They upload your file
Most tools send audio to a server and ask you to trust a policy. Here there is no request to make: the speech model runs inside the browser tab, on your graphics card.
02
They meter the free tier
Thirty minutes a month, then a wall. Local processing costs us nothing per file, so there is no meter, no queue and no account.
03
They lock the export
Plain text, SRT and VTT all download immediately, with timestamps, without an email address.
How it works
Four steps, all of them on your machine.
Step 01
The model downloads once
The first run fetches the speech model, about 200 MB, into your browser cache. Every later file starts instantly.
Step 02
Your file is decoded in a stream
The browser reads the audio a few seconds at a time, so an hour-long meeting recording does not need an hour of memory.
Step 03
The GPU does the listening
WebGPU runs the model on your graphics card, faster than the recording plays back, and the text appears on screen as it goes.
Step 04
You take the text with you
Search inside the transcript, copy it, or download TXT, SRT or VTT. Close the tab and it is gone from this site, because it was never here.
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