MacWhisper Is The Free Transcription Software I’ve Been Waiting For

Are you looking for Mac software to transcribe audio files into written text files? There are plenty of paid tools, like Otter.ai and Trint, that can cost real money when you start using them too much. But MacWhisper is the free solution the internet has been waiting for. Or, at least, the one I’ve been waiting for.

OpenAI released an incredibly powerful free program back in September 2022 that allowed people with some tech savvy to convert their audio and video files into incredibly accurate transcripts. The problem was that it wasn’t very accessible to the average user, since you needed to be familiar with using commands in the Terminal app.

But with MacWhisper, which was first spotted by 9to5Mac, someone has finally developed a GUI, or graphical user interface, that builds on top of OpenAI’s Whisper and leaves all the confusing tech stuff under the hood, letting you just drag and drop your audio file and get a transcription very quickly. And MacWhisper is extremely accurate because OpenAI’s Whisper has been trained on 680,000 hours of audio data on the web.

One of the nice things about MacWhisper is that you’re not uploading the audio or video file that you want transcribed to the internet. That’s important for journalists who may be working on a sensitive story, or anyone who’s just generally wary of uploading their personal files to the cloud. The file stays on your desktop, meaning that there’s no chance anyone could intercept your audio.

Again, MacWhisper is just a new user interface for a free program that was introduced by OpenAI late last year, but it’s really going to make audio transcription easy for just about anyone. Because I’ve been using Whisper and have found it tremendously useful since it was released. And even I will now be using MacWhsiper, because it’s sure to speed up my workflow.

As just one example, after news of crypto company FTX’s collapse, I used Whisper to transcribe dozens of hours of old YouTube interviews with company founder Sam Bankman-Fried. From there, I was able to search the transcripts and find weird and interesting ideas for articles to…