“Free transcription” means very different things depending on the tool — some cap you by minutes per month, some by file length, some just aren’t very accurate below a certain audio quality. Here’s what the free tiers of the main options actually offer, so you can pick based on your actual use case instead of trial and error.
If you’re transcribing meetings regularly
Otter.ai’s free Basic plan allows up to 300 minutes of transcription per month, with each individual recording capped at 30 minutes (recording past that point continues, but you only get a transcript of the first 30 minutes unless you upgrade). It also allows importing up to 3 audio/video files total on the free plan — not per month, total. One quirk worth knowing: deleted conversations still count against your monthly minute allowance, so clearing old transcripts doesn’t free up capacity.
Fathom offers unlimited meeting recordings on its free plan (a real advantage over Otter’s minute cap) but limits you to 5 AI-generated summaries per month — the raw transcript isn’t capped, but the AI summary layer on top of it is.
tl;dv also allows unlimited recordings for free, with recordings auto-deleting after 90 days, but caps AI summaries at 10 total, for the lifetime of the free account (not monthly) — meant more as a taste of the feature than ongoing use.
If you need to transcribe a single existing audio file (not a live meeting)
HappyScribe offers a roughly 10-minute free trial for uploaded file transcription, with support for 150+ languages — useful for a one-off need, not a recurring workflow. If you’re transcribing a lecture recording to turn into study notes afterward, it’s worth pairing with our roundup of 8 free AI tools that actually help with studying for the next step.
If you want unlimited, private, offline transcription
OpenAI’s Whisper model can be run locally on your own computer at no cost and with no usage limit, and supports around 99 languages. The trade-off is technical: it requires installing and running the model yourself (or through a third-party app that wraps it), and it’s known to occasionally “hallucinate” — generating plausible-sounding but incorrect text — on unclear or noisy audio, so it’s worth a manual proofread pass rather than trusting it blindly on important recordings.
Meetily (open-source, “Community Edition”) is also fully free and unlimited, supporting around 99 languages, but multiple reviewers report it struggles with reliably detecting speech in the first place — a more basic problem than transcription accuracy, and one worth testing on a short sample before relying on it for anything important.
Accuracy: what to actually expect
None of these tools are perfect, and accuracy drops significantly with background noise, overlapping speakers, heavy accents relative to the model’s training data, or low-quality microphones. Several free tools reviewed here (tl;dv, Meetily on noisy audio) were specifically flagged as inconsistent rather than simply “less accurate” — meaning results can vary a lot between recordings, not just be uniformly slightly worse. For anything where accuracy actually matters (legal, medical, or official records), free automated transcription should be treated as a first draft that needs a human proofread, not a finished product — professional human transcription services exist for a reason and are worth the cost when precision is non-negotiable.
A practical starting point: if you occasionally need to transcribe a meeting, Otter’s 300 free minutes/month covers a reasonable amount of regular use. If you need unlimited volume and don’t mind a technical setup, Whisper run locally is the most flexible free option. If you just need one file transcribed occasionally, a short free trial tool is enough — don’t sign up for a subscription-based tool for a one-time need.
Note on limits: free-tier minute caps and feature limits on all of these tools change periodically — verify current numbers on each provider’s own pricing page before building a workflow around a specific limit.
Sources:
Otter.ai Help Center, “Conversation, import, and app limits on the Basic free plan” — help.otter.ai
HappyScribe, “5 Best Free Transcription Software” — happyscribe.com
