Free meeting transcription, with speaker labels, no sign-up
By The Assistly team ·
Most "free" transcription tools are a sign-up form with a stopwatch behind it. Ten free minutes, then a plan; or a transcript you can read on screen but only export once you've paid; or speaker labels held back as the premium feature. We wanted something we could point people to without that asterisk, so we built one: tryassistly.com/tools/meeting-transcription.
Drop in an MP3, a WAV, an M4A, the audio track of a video, or press Record and talk. About a minute later you have a transcript with timestamps and a label on every line saying who said it. Copy it, download it as plain text, or download SRT or WebVTT subtitles. No account, no watermark, no export gate.
Why it can be free
Assistly already pays for a transcription engine. It's what listens to your calls live, keeps every speaker straight, and puts the answer on your screen while the question is still being asked. Lending that engine to a recording under thirty minutes costs us cents. So instead of a meter, there is a cap: one recording can be up to 30 minutes, and each person gets about three hours of audio a day. That is enough for a voice memo, a lecture, an interview, or a short meeting, and it keeps the tool free for everyone rather than exhausted by a few scripts.
What happens to your audio
Your file goes over an encrypted connection to our server, which checks it and hands it to the engine. The transcript comes back to your browser, and the audio and the text are deleted from the engine as soon as your browser has them. We don't store recordings or transcripts, we never see them, and nothing is used to train a model. That is the same arrangement the Assistly app runs on, and it's written into our privacy policy.
What you get
- Speaker labels. Every line is attributed, and the text view reads like a script, one paragraph per turn. It's the difference between a transcript and a wall of text, and it's the thing most free tools charge for.
- Dozens of languages, detected automatically, even when speakers switch mid-sentence.
- Timestamps you can click. Every line replays the recording from that point, which is the fastest way to check a word you don't trust.
- Free exports. Plain text, SRT, and WebVTT, the formats video editors, YouTube, and media players expect.
What it doesn't do
It transcribes recordings. It doesn't sit in the call with you.
That is the line between the tool and the product. The free tool gives you the transcript after the meeting. Assistly is the same engine during one: it follows the conversation as it happens, with no 30-minute cap, puts the answer on your screen while the question is still being asked, and writes the recap with action items when you hang up. If the transcript you just made is from a meeting you wish you'd had help in, that is the desktop app.
For everything else (a voice memo, a lecture, an interview you recorded, a video that needs captions) the free tool is right there, and it stays free.