Best Transcription Software in 2026

Otter.ai records and transcribes meetings and conversations in real time, joining video calls automatically and producing searchable transcripts and summaries. The free Basic plan includes 300 minutes of meeting transcription a month and three imported files over the account's lifetime. Pro costs US$16.99 per user a month billed monthly (US$8.33 annually) with 1,200 minutes and 10 imported files a month; Business costs US$30 monthly (US$19.99 annually) with unlimited meeting transcription; and Enterprise is priced on request. AI transcription supports English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.

Rev offers both machine transcription and a human transcription service, which makes it suitable when a verified transcript is required. AI plans start with a Free tier of 45 minutes per user a month; Essentials costs US$29.99 per seat monthly (US$25.49 annually) with 5,000 AI minutes, and Pro US$59.99 monthly (US$47.99 annually) with 10,000 minutes. Human transcription starts at US$1.99 a minute, which Rev says is 99%+ accurate and delivered in 12 hours or less, with subscriber discounts. Legal-formatted transcripts are priced per page, from US$2.25.

Sonix transcribes and translates uploaded audio and video, with an in-browser editor for correcting text and exporting transcripts and subtitles. It supports more than 54 languages. Pay As You Go costs US$10 an hour with no monthly fee. Subscriptions are Core at US$25 a month for 5 hours, Advanced at US$50 for 20 hours and Pro at US$80 for 40 hours, with annual equivalents of US$275, US$550 and US$880 and extra hours at US$10. Enterprise pricing is custom.

Trint is AI transcription and media production software with features for live capture, archive bulk transcription, rough cuts, captioning, translation and an AI assistant. Its Story Builder turns verified quotes into drafts. The company lists newsrooms, sports media, production, education, law firms and financial services among its markets and highlights Al Jazeera, the BBC and AFP as media users. Live transcription works in more than 50 languages and translation in more than 70. Trint gives its address as Shoreditch Exchange, London, with a North American office in Toronto. Prices are listed on a separate plans page that could not be retrieved for this review.

Descript transcribes audio and video and lets users edit the media by editing the resulting text, which makes it popular for podcasts and video production. Transcription on all plans supports 25 languages, multitrack recordings and eight or more speakers. The Free plan includes 60 media minutes a month. Hobbyist includes 10 hours, Creator 30 hours and Business 40 hours of media a month per editor, with listed prices of US$24, US$35 and US$65 a month and lower figures shown for annual billing; Enterprise is custom.

Fireflies.ai joins online meetings through a bot or browser extension, transcribes them and produces notes and summaries. Its pricing page lists Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise plans billed per seat, with volume discounts for teams of more than 50 through sales. Fireflies states there are no monthly rate limits on its meeting bot or Chrome extension, while the API, dialers and bulk uploads are rate-limited. English is the primary language, with Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian supported and more than 100 other languages in beta. Per-seat prices were not displayed on the page when accessed.

Notta transcribes meetings and uploaded recordings and offers translation as add-ons. The Free plan includes 120 minutes a month with a three-minute limit per recording. Pro costs US$8.17 a month billed annually (US$97.99 a year) with 1,800 minutes, and Business US$16.67 a month billed annually with unlimited minutes; both allow recordings up to five hours. Enterprise starts at 51 seats. Translation add-ons cost US$6 or US$9 a month billed annually, and custom vocabulary is available in English and Japanese.

Deepgram provides speech recognition through an API, used by developers in contact-centre, voice-agent and media applications. Its Nova-3 models support more than 60 languages. Pay-as-you-go pricing is US$0.0043 a minute for pre-recorded monolingual audio and US$0.0077 for streaming, with higher multilingual rates and discounts on the Growth plan; usage is billed per second with no minimums. New users receive a US$200 credit that does not expire and needs no card, which Deepgram estimates covers about 43,000 minutes of Nova-3 transcription.

AssemblyAI offers speech-to-text and speech-understanding models through an API. Pre-recorded transcription costs US$0.21 an hour with Universal-3.5 Pro or US$0.15 with Universal-2, while streaming costs US$0.15 an hour on Universal-Streaming and US$0.45 base on Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime, billed on connection time. Add-ons such as speaker diarization, medical mode and key-term prompting are charged on top. New accounts receive US$50 in free credit without a card. PII redaction on Universal-2 works in 47+ languages.

Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model released by OpenAI, with both code and model weights under the MIT licence. It performs multilingual recognition, speech translation and language identification. The repository lists six sizes, from tiny (39 million parameters, about 1 GB of video memory) to large (1,550 million, about 10 GB), plus a turbo variant of large-v3 that is faster with minimal accuracy loss but not trained for translation. English-only versions of the smaller models are also provided. Because it runs locally, audio does not have to be sent to a vendor.