Here is a free tool that allows you to effortlessly transcribe your videos into audio, and it’s quite accurate.
I have been using it for the past few days, and I wanted to tell you about this free tool called Mac’s Whisper.
What is Transcribing?
Transcribing is the process of converting audio into text. You may have seen many videos on YouTube and other social media platforms that have subtitles or captions.
Those subtitles are a transcription of the audio in the video because surprisingly, many people watch videos without sound. When they have subtitles, they watch a few seconds and then decide whether to continue watching the video or not.
Captions or Subtitles are quite important, which is why YouTube has a feature for auto-generating subtitles and closed captions for all videos. It helps users understand the context of the video.
Watch the Video How to Transcribe Audio and Video to Text
You Need Captions on Videos for More People to Watch
Even Instagram offers a feature to create captions from videos. While these auto-generating features of social media apps are good, they give you little to no control over how the transcription is done, and sometimes the quality is poor.
That’s why I recommend everyone to use a standalone application for transcribing videos and creating subtitles. Doing it manually takes a lot of time, and when you need to create videos quickly, it becomes a challenge.
I always emphasize creating a faster workflow, and that’s why I suggest using AI tools that can speed up your workflow by 5x or even 10x.
There are already many apps for creating subtitles, which we have discussed in a separate. post, sure to check it out.
MacWhisper – Free App Mac App to Transcribe Audio and Video to Text
While browsing the OpenAI website, which is the parent company of ChatGPT, a company that has made a significant impact in just six months, I found out that they have a range of other AI products.
Whisper is a transcribing tool that converts speech into text, and it does a fairly good job. It’s a pure AI product from OpenAI, and other companies and startups can create products around it using their API. There is a lot of documentation available, and you can even create your own web app using it.
I was going through the documentation to create a web app for myself because it’s absolutely free. There are a few apps that charge around $9 to $10 per transcription of a video. So this one is really good and promising.
However, during my search, I came across an app called MacWhisper, available on Gumroad. It was created by Jordy Bruin.
This application has both a free version and a pro version. The difference between the two is that the free version offers slightly downgraded transcription capabilities, while the pro version provides more advanced features.
The pro version is available for a one-time payment of 18 euros and includes features like batch transcriptions and the ability to manually add speakers to your transcripts.
If you just want to transcribe a video or audio file, the free version works really well.
When I downloaded and installed Mac Whisper, it prompted me to upgrade, but I used the free version and it works quite well.
The interface of Mac Whisper is quite user-friendly. You can drag and drop any audio or video file to transcribe or start the recording inside the app as well.
The transcription it also pretty fast and you get to export the text in different formats.
If I export the SRT file, I can import it into Final Cut Pro or any other video editing application to add captions. The process is similar across different applications. In Final Cut Pro, I use a plugin called Caption Burner to import the SRT file and add captions to the video.
