About this tool
This tool wraps the browser's native Web Speech API to turn speech into text live, right on this page. Click Start, speak, and watch words appear as you talk: interim (still-being-recognized) text shows in a lighter, italic style, then locks in as finalized text once the browser is confident it's correct. Continuous mode keeps listening through natural pauses instead of stopping after one sentence, and a language selector lets you switch the recognition language to match what you're speaking.
Unlike the rest of this site's tools, which run entirely offline in your browser, speech recognition here depends on the Web Speech API's underlying service — and in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, that means your audio is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing. Firefox and Safari currently offer little to no support for this API, so this tool works best in a Chromium-based browser. If you're transcribing anything sensitive, weigh that trade-off before you start.
Frequently asked questions
Is my voice recording private?
It depends entirely on your browser, and this is an important exception to how every other tool on this site works. In Chrome and most Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, etc.), the Web Speech API this tool uses sends your audio to a cloud speech-recognition service (Google's, by default) for processing — it is NOT purely on-device like this site's other tools. If audio privacy matters for what you're transcribing, check your specific browser's documentation/privacy policy before using this tool, or consider a fully offline transcription tool instead for sensitive content.
Why doesn't this work in my browser?
The Web Speech API this tool relies on is a browser feature, not something this page can add on its own, and browser support is genuinely uneven: Chrome and most Chromium-based browsers support it well, while Firefox has little to no support and Safari's support has historically been limited/inconsistent across versions. The page detects this automatically and shows a clear "not supported" message rather than silently failing — if you see that message, try switching to a recent version of Chrome or Edge.