How to Transcribe Audio and Video to Text (and Read Text Back Aloud) for Free
Turning speech into text and text into speech solve opposite problems, but both save real time: one turns a recording you'd otherwise have to listen through manually into something you can skim and search, the other turns written text into something you can listen to hands-free.
Transcribing a recording automatically
Audio/Video to Text uploads an audio or video file and returns a text transcript, which is genuinely useful for meeting recordings you need searchable minutes from, interviews you need to quote accurately, or lecture recordings you want to review by reading instead of re-watching. Unlike every other tool on the site, this one does require uploading your file to a server to run the transcription model — everything else runs entirely in your browser, but speech recognition at this quality needs more processing power than a browser alone can provide.
- Clear audio with one speaker at a time transcribes most accurately.
- Background noise or overlapping speakers (a busy meeting, a noisy room) reduces accuracy — worth a quick read-through of the transcript against the recording for anything you'll quote directly.
- Longer recordings take proportionally longer to process, so a full lecture will take a bit longer than a short voice memo.
Converting text into spoken audio
Text to Speech reads written text — pasted directly, or extracted from an uploaded PDF — aloud using your browser's built-in voice engine. It's useful for proofreading your own writing by ear (mistakes are often easier to catch by hearing them than reading them), for making a document accessible to someone who prefers listening, or simply for consuming a long document while doing something else.
Because it uses your browser's built-in voices rather than a paid cloud voice service, the available voices and their exact quality depend on your device and operating system — it also means there's no cost or account required, but the audio plays live and isn't offered as a downloadable file.
Putting both together
A common workflow: transcribe a recorded meeting to get a searchable text record, then later use text-to-speech to have a written summary or document read back to you while doing something else. Neither replaces careful listening or reading for anything high-stakes, but both remove the friction of switching formats manually.