Best Offline Transcription Apps for Mac & iPhone (2026)

The short answer

• You need team collaboration and shared annotation — go cloud: Otter or Notta. The cost is that the audio uploads and the subscription renews.
• The audio must stay on your own device — the realistic field is two apps: MacWhisper is the Swiss Army knife, complete but complex; Whisper Notes is the simple one. Both ship on Mac and iOS.
• You are on Windows or Linux, or the budget is zero — Buzz, free and open source.
• You record an English memo now and then — Apple's built-in tools already do it free.

Can your recordings go to someone else's server?

Speech-to-text tools come in exactly two kinds: the model runs on your own device, or you call a vendor's API. That decides the privacy of your recordings, the accuracy, and usually the price — API services are essentially subscription-only, never a one-time purchase.

The upside of an API is cloud GPU inference: the model can be several gigabytes, even tens of gigabytes, which buys leading transcription accuracy — ElevenLabs' Scribe, for instance. The costs are just as concrete: your audio goes to someone else's server, the minutes are metered, there is a cap, and the subscription renews.

Apple's M-series chips and recent iPhones, meanwhile, now have enough local compute to run the open speech models and shrink that gap to something most recordings will not notice (the full comparison is in the FAQ below) — the recording never leaves the device, transcription is fast and accurate, and these apps are usually sold once.

The rest of this page covers only the local tools.

The field, at a glance

🟢 Supported · 🟡 Partial · 🔴 Not supported

Features and prices are as each vendor states them on its own site, and they move; the table order is not a ranking. Check the vendor before you buy.

The local race: MacWhisper or Whisper Notes

Once the audio stays on the machine, the shortlist on Apple platforms is two apps: MacWhisper and Whisper Notes. Both run the same open speech models, both are sold once, both ship on Mac and iPhone, and both pass the airplane-mode test at the bottom of this page. They differ in temperament, not principle: one lays out every option, the other keeps the screen clear.

MacWhisper — every feature a transcription app can have

MacWhisper's free tier covers basic transcription of the common audio and video formats in 100+ languages, with plain-text and SRT/VTT export, microphone recording and system-wide dictation. The Pro license — a one-time €64 with lifetime updates, stated on MacWhisper's own site — opens out into a genuine workstation: automatic speaker recognition, batch queues, watched folders, YouTube and media-URL transcription, meeting recording across Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, Chime and Discord, subtitle translation, per-speaker podcast files, .docx/.pdf/.md/.html export, a CLI, and integrations with Notion, Obsidian and Zapier. If a transcription feature exists, MacWhisper has probably shipped it. If you want every option under one roof, buy it; if you would rather the tool stayed simple, keep reading for Whisper Notes.

The cost of that breadth is the shape of the tool: dense. Its iOS app is called Whisper Transcription and carries a subset of the Mac feature set; per the vendor's own documentation, the on-device model needs an iPhone 15 or newer. If you enjoy a cockpit — many professionals do — none of that is a drawback. The feature-by-feature comparison is at Whisper Notes vs MacWhisper.

Whisper Notes — three jobs, done cleanly, on both your devices

Whisper Notes concentrates on the three things people actually do with speech, and keeps everything around them minimal. Voice typing: hold Fn and speak, and the words are typed into whatever app has focus — Slack, an editor, a terminal (Direct Download build). Meeting transcription: system audio plus microphone on both Mac channels, no bot in the call; the Direct Download build detects Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls and starts recording by itself, then writes the summary and action items locally with Gemma 4 — no API key, no cloud call. File transcription: three engines on every channel — Parakeet V3, Whisper, SenseVoice — covering 101 languages, with Speaker Labels computed on-device that tag an hour of audio in about 15 seconds.

On the iPhone you get the full toolset, not a trimmed one: recording, file import, folders, engine choice and Speaker Labels all run on the phone itself (iOS 18 or later, iPhone 12 or newer recommended), with one $7.99 App Store purchase covering both the iPhone app and the Mac App Store version. The interface stays out of the way: record, read, export, done.

So choose by temperament. If you want every option and enjoy a dense tool, buy MacWhisper. If you want the tool to disappear — three jobs done well, a clean screen, the same app in your pocket — buy Whisper Notes. Both answers keep your audio at home; neither uploads a byte.

Job 1: Voice typing into the cursor

This is the workflow where you hold a key, speak a sentence, release, and the text lands in whatever app has focus. It is the most demanding job on this page: the tool has to be fast enough that you stop noticing it, and it has to insert text into apps it does not control.

Whisper Notes does this natively on the Mac — hold Fn, speak, release — using the same local engines that transcribe your recordings, with nothing to configure and no per-app setup. It ships in the Direct Download build; the App Store build cannot include it, because Apple's sandbox rules keep out the accessibility API that types into other apps — the story behind why the Mac app left the App Store. The mechanics are written up in Mac system-wide dictation with Whisper.

The dictation specialists: Superwhisper and VoiceInk

Two apps treat dictation not as a feature but as the entire product; if dictation is your whole working day, they earn the look. Superwhisper's "modes" system reshapes a raw transcript with a prompt — into an email, a commit message, a bug report — and nobody has matched it. It is also where the cloud enters: the design is hybrid, local models by default, but several accuracy and rewriting features route your audio or text through a cloud provider — whether it is "local" depends on the mode you picked. It runs on macOS, Windows and iOS, the free tier does not expire, and the lifetime license listed on its own site, $249.99, is the highest price on this page. VoiceInk covers the same dictation loop on Apple Silicon Macs for a $29 one-time license (more for multiple Macs), developed in public on GitHub — a privacy claim you can check by reading the source. The longer side-by-side is on our Superwhisper alternative page.

The decision rule is workload. If dictation is your entire job and prompt-driven rewriting is the point, buy the specialist. If voice typing is one of several things you do — alongside meetings, recordings and files from your phone — Whisper Notes does it inside the app that already handles the rest: one tool, one payment, one privacy model, local without conditions.

Apple Dictation — free, already installed, genuinely fine

Before paying anyone, try the dictation that ships with macOS and iOS. On modern hardware it runs on-device for many languages, it is system-wide, and for short messages the gap to a paid tool is smaller than the internet suggests. Where it falls down is long-form: punctuation discipline, technical vocabulary, and the absence of any cleanup pass. If you dictate a paragraph and then spend a minute fixing it, that is the moment a paid tool starts paying for itself.

Job 2: Transcribing a file you already have

Here the constraints invert: nothing is real-time, you have an MP3, an M4A or an MP4, and you want the text out of it. Three things separate the tools — where the file is, what language is in it, and how much of the surrounding work (speaker labels, formats, batch) the app does for you.

Whisper Notes — files on either device, with the engine matched to the language

If the recording is on your iPhone: Buzz has no phone app; MacWhisper has an iOS app (Whisper Transcription), but per its own documentation the on-device model needs an iPhone 15 or newer. Whisper Notes records and transcribes on the iPhone itself (iOS 18 or later, iPhone 12 or newer recommended), imports from Files and Voice Memos including video, and one $7.99 App Store purchase covers both the iPhone app and the Mac App Store version — so the phone is not a capture device for some other tool, it is the tool.

If the audio is Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Cantonese, the engine matters more than the app. Whisper is not the strongest model for CJK, and most tools on this page only run Whisper. Whisper Notes ships SenseVoice alongside Whisper and Parakeet V3 on every channel — in our test it transcribed a 27-minute Chinese podcast in 13.83 seconds on an M4 Pro, with better punctuation than Whisper. The comparison is in SenseVoice vs Whisper for CJK, and the per-engine language table is at whispernotes.app/languages.

If you need to know who spoke, Speaker Labels run on-device on every channel — the iPhone app since 1.8.5, the Mac App Store build, and the Direct Download (DMG) build since 1.5.1 — labeling an hour of audio in about 15 seconds. Voiceprints are biometric data, which is a good reason to want that computation happening on your own chip; the model and its failure cases are described in on-device speaker diarization. Of the other local tools here, only MacWhisper's Pro tier also does speaker recognition; Aiko and Apple's built-ins do not.

On raw English throughput the field is closer than any vendor wants to admit, because everyone runs the same open models. For reference: Parakeet V3 transcribed 35 minutes of audio in 18 seconds on an M4 Pro in the benchmark runs we published — numbers you can reproduce, and which say more about the models than about the apps wrapping them. If you prefer a terminal to a window, the Direct Download build ships a CLI and an MCP server from 1.5.5, so scripts and AI assistants can transcribe and search locally.

MacWhisper — the deepest file workflow on the Mac

If files arrive on your Mac in volume — a podcast back-catalogue, a folder of interviews — MacWhisper Pro is built exactly for that: batch queues, watched folders that transcribe whatever lands in them, YouTube and media-URL input, and export into Notion, Obsidian and office formats. That workstation depth is real — and it is deliberately not where our depth went: ours went into the iPhone app, the CJK engines and on-device Speaker Labels instead. So the split is the one from the shortlist above: files pile up on a Mac, MacWhisper; files start on a phone, or the audio is CJK, or you want the same app at both ends of the cable, Whisper Notes.

Buzz — free, open source, and the answer on Windows and Linux

Buzz is an MIT-licensed desktop app that runs Whisper locally on macOS, Windows and Linux, with GPU acceleration, folder watching, TXT/SRT/VTT export and a CLI. It wins two situations outright. Budget: free with no per-minute cap beats every paid tool on this page if money is the binding constraint. Platform: we have no Windows or Android app and are not building one, so on Windows our recommendation is Buzz or a command-line tool like faster-whisper — that recommendation has its own page on this site, because sending people to the right tool beats pretending. The trade is polish: Buzz is a utility rather than a product, and it shows in the interface and the setup. On an Apple device, with a few dollars of budget, a purpose-built app is the nicer thing to use every day.

Aiko — the simplest one-shot transcription

Aiko does one thing: drop in audio or video, get an on-device Whisper transcription back, exportable as subtitles. It is a $24 one-time Universal Purchase covering iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro, and nothing leaves the device. Its limits are its design: no speaker identification, no choice of engine, no in-app editing — you export and fix the text elsewhere. If your need is "occasionally turn a recording into text with zero configuration", Aiko is a clean answer. The moment you need to know who spoke, pick a stronger engine for your language, or edit the transcript where it lives, you have outgrown it — and that is precisely the gap Whisper Notes occupies at a comparable price.

Job 3: Capturing a live meeting

With meetings, offline versus cloud stops being a matter of principle: there are other people in the room. The real split is what happens to the notes after the meeting ends.

Otter and Notta win if the notes are a team artifact

If you want captions appearing live during the call, a searchable shared workspace, calendar integration that joins meetings for you, and a link you can send to someone who missed it — buy a cloud tool. Otter's Basic tier is free with 300 minutes a month and a 30-minute cap per conversation; Pro is $16.99 per user per month, or $8.33 per month billed annually. Notta is a close equivalent with strong real-time translation. No offline tool does any of that, and no amount of local-first engineering will change it: collaboration requires a server. What you accept in exchange is that the audio is uploaded, the minutes are metered, the subscription renews, and a bot may appear in the participant list. Our detailed take is on Whisper Notes vs Otter.ai and Notta alternatives.

Whisper Notes and MacWhisper win if the recording must not leave the machine

The other half of the market is meetings that cannot be uploaded: patient consultations, privileged legal calls, board and compensation discussions, unannounced product work, interviews where the source was promised the recording stays put. Here a local tool is not a preference, it is the requirement. Superwhisper's own site also lists meeting recording, but it is a hybrid design, so whether the audio stays local depends on the mode you picked — if "must never upload" is a hard constraint, that has to be confirmed mode by mode rather than assumed.

Whisper Notes records meetings from system audio plus microphone on both Mac channels, with no bot joining the call and nothing visible to the other participants. The Direct Download (DMG) build additionally detects Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls and starts the recording for you — walk into the call, and the transcript is simply there afterwards, with Speaker Labels separating who said what and Gemma 4 writing the summary and action items on the machine, no API key, no cloud call. The Mac App Store version records manually, because Apple's rules keep the automatic detection out. The walkthrough is in offline meeting transcription on Mac. MacWhisper Pro also records meetings locally and covers a wider list of conferencing apps — Webex, Skype, Chime, Discord — so if your calls live in those, it may decide it for you.

One limitation applies across the offline field, and we would rather you learn it now than after buying: none of the polished consumer apps here produce live captions during the call. Whisper Notes transcribes after the recording stops, not while you speak. If someone in the room needs to read the words as they are said, you need a cloud service or a dedicated captioning product.

Try Apple's built-in tools first

Voice Memos will transcribe a recording at no cost — on a Mac with Apple silicon running macOS 15 or later, and on iPhone since iOS 18. Combined with system Dictation, that covers a real share of casual use, and any recommendation that skips past it is trying to sell you something.

It has four hard limits: a restricted list of languages, far short of Whisper's 101 (per-engine breakdown on our languages page); no speaker separation; no real export — you select and copy, no TXT, SRT or VTT; and no batch — one recording at a time, made in Apple's own app. If none of that matters to you, stop reading and save your money.

Pick by constraint

How to verify any of these claims yourself

Every vendor on this page, us included, says the word "private". You do not have to take anyone's word for it. Five checks, none of which need a technical background:

1. The airplane-mode test. Turn on Airplane Mode, or switch off Wi-Fi and unplug Ethernet, then record something and transcribe it. If the transcript still appears at full speed, processing is local. If you get a spinner, an error, or a queued job that completes the moment you reconnect, it is not. Do this after the app has finished downloading its model — a genuinely local tool needs the network exactly once, to fetch model weights.
2. Read the App Store privacy label. On the App Store listing, scroll to App Privacy. "Data Not Collected" is a claim the developer makes to Apple, with consequences for lying. Compare it against what the marketing page says. Also check whether the app requires an account: if you must create a login to transcribe, something is leaving your device.
3. Watch the network. A firewall like Little Snitch or the open-source LuLu shows you every outbound connection an app attempts. Transcribe a file with it running. Update checks and license validation are normal and small; a sustained upload the size of your audio file is not.
4. Look for the minute cap. Pricing pages are an honest signal. Per-minute charges and monthly minute allowances exist because compute is being spent on somebody else's servers. A tool that runs on your hardware has no reason to meter you, so unlimited local transcription is the default, not a premium tier.
5. Check whether "local" means "local by default". Several good tools are hybrid: local models for speed, cloud models for accuracy or rewriting, chosen per mode. That is a reasonable design, but it means the privacy answer depends on your settings rather than on the app. Find the model picker, see which option is selected, and check whether any text-cleanup or summarization step calls out separately from the transcription step.

Run those five against us as readily as against anyone else. Whisper Notes has no accounts, no login, and no hybrid mode — there is nothing to configure to make it local, because there is no other way it runs. The airplane-mode test takes thirty seconds and is worth more than this paragraph.

Where Whisper Notes does not fit

The cases where you should buy something else, spelled out:

• Windows or Android. There is no build and none is planned. Use Buzz or faster-whisper.
• Intel Macs. The Mac app requires Apple Silicon. MacWhisper and Buzz are the fallbacks.
• Live captioning. Transcription happens after the recording, not during it.
• Collaboration. No shared workspace, no comments, no cloud sync between your own devices. It is a single-user tool by construction — that is what "no server" means.
• Prompt-driven rewriting. Superwhisper's modes reshape what you said into an email or a commit message. We transcribe what you said and leave your words alone.

Everything else — voice typing on a Mac (Direct Download build), meetings that must stay private, files from a phone, CJK audio, knowing who spoke, paying once — is what Whisper Notes was built for. The details are on the Whisper Notes homepage; if your situation is one of the five above, one of the other tools on this page is a better use of your money, and we would rather you spent it there.

Frequently asked questions

If you are comparing local speech models rather than apps, see the Whisper transcription guide for model sizes and ways to run Whisper, and the complete offline speech-to-text guide for the wider landscape including Windows and Android.

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