The iPhone’s functionality gets better with every release, doesn’t it? You can do almost anything on your iPhone or tablet now. You can take a meeting. You can edit videos on your iPhone. You can create music. You can even make phone calls! Crazy stuff.
An underrated function of your iPhone and its iOS operating system is the ability to record your voice and transcribe that speech-to-text form.
This comes in handy for any number of situations, from impromptu interviews to focus group sessions to creative ideas you have while driving. Transcription makes long voice recordings much easier to work with by taking cumbersome files and turning them into searchable, scannable text, and it makes it simple to capture stray thoughts and ideas.
There are a number of free speech-to-text transcription apps for iOS available in the App Store. Here are seven of the best!
1. VoiceHub
Rev’s new VoiceHub is the engine that runs our mobile app. The app captures high-quality audio recordings and lets you order transcripts automatically from your phone. And with the new VoiceHub functionality, you can work smarter than ever before.
In addition to transcribing your recordings automatically, and with high accuracy, app users can access VoiceHub’s AI assistant, which can take notes for you, summarize meetings, and highlight insights or important information in your transcript.
Rev’s free speech-to-text transcription app for iOS was great, but it’s only gotten better with VoiceHub!
Cost: Free for 300 ai transcription minutes, while paid plans start at $9.99/month for 1,200 minutes
What Makes It Great: VoiceHub’s AI assistant can take notes for you.
2. Apple Voice Control
The best apps are often apps that come to you, and Apple’s Voice Control comes pre-installed on every Mac and iOS device. Voice Control is a great, if not as accurate as Rev’s industry-leading ASR, speech-to-text app for transcribing audio, but it rises above many similar apps because it also lets you control your phone via your voice. The voice control feature makes it easy to navigate iOS and even edit messages hands-free.
Apple Voice Control might not be one of the best voice recorder apps for iPhone, but it’s certainly the most inclusive due to its completely hands-free controls that allow access to anyone.
Cost: Free
What Makes It Great: Ability to control your entire phone hands-free.
3. Google Assistant
Though Google Assistant isn’t specifically made for speech-to-text, its simplicity makes it a handy free app for taking notes, setting reminders with your voice, and generally typing with your voice. It’s extra handy if you’re already part of the Google ecosystem, because you can easily transfer your voice-to-text files to Google Drive and Gmail. Though you can still get plenty of use out of it even if you’re on an iOS device.
The drawback of Google Assistant is that it can’t transcribe pre-existing audio and video files. But if you want a free, easy-to-use iOS app for taking voice notes, you could do worse than Google Assistant.
Cost: Free
What Makes It Great: Easily integrates with all Google products
4. Evernote
Evernote is a note-taking app that offers simple speech-to-text capabilities by integrating directly with your phone’s voice recognition function. You can record audio directly into Evernote and it will automatically produce a transcript of your speech. This option is great if you already use Evernote to take notes and keep your documents organized.
The quality of the speech-to-text technology in Evernote is somewhat low and it doesn’t currently transcribe pre-recorded files. But if you’re already an Evernote user, this is the voice recognition software for you.
Cost: Free
What Makes It Great: If you already use Evernote, this function is just icing on the cake!
5. Notta
Notta is a handy voice-to-text app available on iOS that offers not only 98% accuracy but support for 58 languages.
Primarily an app for recording and taking notes in meetings, Notta’s high level of accuracy makes it a great all-around app for speech-to-text. It’ll also integrate with most of the prominent meeting platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, automatically taking notes for you.
Cost: Free for 120 minutes per month, while paid plans start at $9/month for 1,800 minutes
What Makes It Great: 58 languages supported
6. Otter.ai
Otter.ai is essentially an AI meeting assistant that will record, transcribe, and take notes for you. It’s more of a meeting app than a voice recorder, so it easily integrates with all the popular meeting platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and will even attend a meeting in your place.
Otter.ai’s ASR is pretty great, although when comparing Rev vs Otter, Rev’s ASR wins every time.
Cost: Free for 300 monthly minutes, while paid plans start at $9/month for 1,200 minutes
What Makes It Great: AI assistant will attend meetings for you.
7. Transkriptor
Transkriptor’s shining feature is its ability to record and transcribe in more than 100 languages, fairly accurately. In fact, online reviews laud its accuracy in difficult languages like Hebrew and German.
In addition to all the basic features a good free speech-to-text transcription app for iOS should have, Transkriptor offers an AI chat option that allows you to interact directly with your transcripts, make edits, highlight sections, and extract important details.
Cost: Free for 300 minutes a month, with paid plans starting at $12.49/month for 2,400 minutes
What Makes It Great: AI chat lets you edit via voice.
What To Look For in a Talk-to-Text App
Though the best speech-to-text free transcription apps for iOS for you might very based on the specific details of the job you’re trying to do, there are a free things you should look for before deciding:
- Accuracy. If the transcript produced by your voice-to-text app is wrong or needs a lot of editing, is it saving you time at all?
- Extra productivity features. The best talk-to-text apps make your job easier by including AI assistants that will summarize your transcripts, highlight important information, take thorough notes, summarize transcripts, and even attend meetings in your place.
- Ease of use. Recording your voice instead of manually typing your notes and thoughts can save you loads of time, but if the app isn’t intuitive or the interface is annoying, it might make you less productive!
How Speech-to-Text Changes The Game
Speech-to-text apps have come a long way since Dragon Dictate, the first speech recognition product for consumers. It wasn’t even an app so much as it was a whole software platform, and it certainly wasn’t very accurate.
But there was something about it that helped people be more productive, or we wouldn’t have the plethora of amazing apps we have today. Speech-to-text saves time, and time is money!
The new wave of iPhone speech-to-text apps really help you step up your productivity by including AI that can do the work of multiple people at once. The days of manually transcribing long recordings are not only over; they’re better than ever, because AI can summarize entire conversations, offer insights, and generally save you hours of time, every day.
Further Reading
There are always advancements in speech-to-text and ASR on the horizon. Here are a few resources for those who want to know more about speech-to-text on other devices, or about ASR in general:
- How to Record Audio on an Android
- Speech Recognition For Professionals
- 5 Best Call Recorder Apps
- The 2024 State of ASR
VoiceHub for the Most Accurate Speech-to-Text
Speech-to-text apps are great, but inaccurate or hard-to-use apps can be more trouble than they’re worth. Rev VoiceHub is designed to help you be up to 120 times more productive when it comes to all things transcription, and it’ll do it with industry-leading accuracy.
If you record voice, you should record it with VoiceHub.
