Writeout.ai is a free and open-source website for audio transcription and transcript translation. Here this web app takes an audio file from you and then transcribes it for you. Not only audio files but it can process MP4 files as well. It does precise speech to text and then generates the final timestamp labeled transcript.
You can download the transcripts in VTT format. Or it gives an extra option to translate this transcript in other languages as well. You can use it online or you can self-host it as its entire source code is available on GitHub.
We have covered audio transcription services and even Whisper itself that this tool is using underneath. But Writeout.ai offers a better and clean UI for converting mp3 audio to text via AI. When you self-host it, then you can supply your own API key in it and then deploy it on any internal server or personal server in the cloud.
Free Self Hosted Audio Transcription Service based on AI with Translation
Getting started with this online tool is very simple. You can access it on this website. But you will have to sign up for a free account. You can sign up using GitHub and then get started.
The main interface of the tool will now show up. Here, you start by uploading an audio or a video file that you’d like to transcribe. So, upload that and procced further.
Now, after submitting the file, you just wait. Depending on the length of the uploaded audio, it will take considerably longer and when it is done, it will show you the output. Scroll down to see the generated transcript. You can download it on your device in VTT format.
Another thing you can use this with this tool is translate the generated transcript. On its UI, it gives you a list of languages in which you can translate a transcript. So, just select a target language from the list and then it will translate the transcript for you. For now, it only supports Spanish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, and even Klingon.
In this way, you can use this simple AI based audio transcription services which is very powerful. Also, don’t forget that you can always self-host it of you want to own your data or in case the main website goes down in the future for some reasons. The installation instructions are simple and mentioned on the GitHub repository of this service.
Closing thoughts:
AI has transformed the traditional transcribing process for audio and video. And the one by OpenAI is far more powerful than the others that exist now. Good news is that you can now use it as both; the services I have mentioned here, and Whisper are open source. Just use the online version or you can run it on your own server or PC.
