SoundWise Launches Free Forever AI Audio and Video Transcription

SoundWise.ai has launched its free forever artificial intelligence transcription tool, a browser-based platform that converts audio and video to text in more than 98 languages, with no per-minute meter and no overall usage cap for individual users.

SoundWise is built around a dual-engine architecture: a free in-browser AI transcription model that runs locally on the user's device, and an optional cloud-powered tier, SoundWise Pro, that delivers human-level accuracy at up to 10 times real-time speed. Together, they cover everything from quick podcast notes to professional-grade speech-to-text workflows for newsrooms, classrooms, and content teams.

"Audio and video should be as easy to search, edit, quote, translate, and repurpose as any other document," said Eric, CEO of SoundWise, in a statement. "We built SoundWise for the work that begins after the record button stops, turning interviews into articles, lectures into study notes, webinars into marketing assets, and raw footage into text that teams can actually use."

Key SoundWise product highlights include the following:

• Free forever, unlimited local AI transcription: Users can transcribe audio and video files directly in their browser, with no per-minute charges and no overall transcription limit for legitimate individual use. Because processing happens locally, sensitive recordings never leave the user's device.
• 10 times faster cloud AI transcription: SoundWise Pro routes files through optimized cloud models. According to SoundWise internal benchmarks, a 1-hour audio recording can be transcribed in approximately 30 seconds (roughly 120 times real-time).
• More than 98 languages with near-human accuracy: The platform handles multilingual speech-to-text tasks across English, Spanish, Mandarin, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and 88 other languages purpose-built for global creators, educators, marketers, journalists, researchers, students, and international teams.
• Broad audio and video format compatibility: Supported file types include MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A, MP4, MOV, MKV, and other common media formats.
• Built-in transcript review tools: Automatic speaker detection and word-level timestamps help users identify who said what and jump straight to key moments in long recordings.
• Flexible export options: Transcripts can be exported as TXT and PDF today, with DOCX and SRT subtitle export rolling out soon.

SoundWise Free offers unlimited audio-to-text and video-to-text conversion with no per-minute meter, no credit card, and no sign-up paywall. Files are processed locally by an in-browser AI model; the browser tab simply needs to stay open during transcription. Based on internal testing, a 1-hour recording averages around 10 minutes of processing time, depending on device performance and file complexity.

This local-first approach is designed for students, independent creators, academic researchers, and privacy-sensitive professionals who regularly work with recorded content but don't need cloud storage or background processing.

The platform accepts every major audio and video format, including MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, M4A, MP4, MOV, and MKV.

SoundWise also ships dedicated landing experiences for the most common conversion tasks, making it easy to go straight from a specific file type to a clean transcript:

• MP3 to text — podcasts, voice memos, and interview recordings.
• MP4 to text — YouTube videos, webinars, and screen recordings.
• MOV, MKV, FLAC, AAC, and M4A to text — high-fidelity and mobile-recorded audio.