Speech to text, online and free
A free online speech to text converter: press one button, talk, and your words appear as punctuated text you can copy or save. No signup, no upload, no waiting. It listens to your microphone live — for a recording you already have, use the audio to text converter instead.
This is live dictation from your microphone.
You press start, you talk, the words appear below. It is not a file transcriber — there is nothing to upload here, and it cannot turn an MP3, an M4A, a voice memo or a video you already recorded into text. For that, use the audio to text converter, which transcribes a file on your own device.
Command list
- “comma”,
- “period / full stop”.
- “question mark”?
- “exclamation mark”!
- “colon”:
- “semicolon”;
- “hyphen”-
- “dash”—
- “ellipsis”…
- “open quote / close quote”“ ”
- “open parenthesis / close parenthesis”( )
- “new line”line break
- “new paragraph”blank line
The trade-off is unavoidable: a sentence about “the reporting period” will end up with a full stop in the middle of it. Untick the box for that kind of dictation, or fix the one word afterwards.
- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
“Undo last phrase” takes back the last thing the microphone added, as many times as you press it. Editing the box by hand starts you fresh — the tool will not undo a phrase once you have changed the text around it.
Honest caveat: this page uses the browser’s own speech engine. In Chrome that engine streams your audio to Google’s servers for recognition — the page itself sends nothing anywhere, but the browser does. Keep genuinely sensitive dictation out of any browser-based recogniser.
This page stores nothing and sends nothing to us — but recognition is done by your browser's speech service, and in Chrome that means your audio goes to Google.
How to use this free online speech to text converter
- Open this page in Chrome, Edge, or another Chromium browser. Firefox has no speech recognition at all, and Safari’s version usually gives up after a few seconds.
- Pick your language from the dropdown. Set it before you start, not after.
- Press Start dictating and approve the microphone prompt. The browser only asks once per site, and only on an HTTPS page.
- Speak in whole sentences at a normal pace. Say “comma”, “full stop” or “new paragraph” where you want them and the tool writes the character rather than the word. Grey italic text under the box is the engine’s running guess; it firms up into the main box a second or two later.
- Got a sentence wrong? Undo last phrase takes back exactly what the microphone last added, as many times as you press it — no dragging a cursor through a paragraph to select it.
- Fix anything left over by typing directly in the box, then Copy text to paste it somewhere or Save .txt to keep a file.
Live dictation, not file transcription
This is the distinction that decides whether this page is any use to you, so it is worth being blunt about. Two completely different jobs get called “speech to text” online:
- Dictation — you talk, and text appears as you speak. That is what this page does.
- Transcription — you already have an MP3, an M4A, a voice memo, a Zoom recording or a video, and you want the words out of it. This page cannot do that. There is no upload button here because there is nothing on the other end to upload to: the recognition happens in your browser, and browsers only expose a live microphone stream, not a file decoder you can feed a recording into.
If you have a recording, use the audio to text converter instead. It runs the open Whisper speech model on your own device, so the file is never uploaded, and it exports plain text or subtitles. If you have something to say and an empty box to fill, you are in the right place. One workaround people try — playing the recording out loud into the microphone — reliably produces worse text than the original audio deserves, because the recogniser is now listening to a speaker, a room and your microphone rather than a voice.
Speaking your punctuation
The Web Speech API hands a page raw recognised words. Chrome adds some punctuation of its own in English, inconsistently and differently between versions, and there is no standard for saying “new paragraph” at all. So this page resolves the commands itself, in the page, after the words come back: “comma” becomes ,, “full stop” and “period” become ., “question mark” becomes ?, and “new paragraph” starts a fresh block. The next sentence gets a capital letter automatically. The full list is under the tool, behind “Command list”.
The trade-off is unavoidable and worth knowing before it surprises you: any tool that treats spoken words as commands will occasionally punctuate a sentence that was about punctuation. Dictate “the reporting period was strong” and you will get a full stop in the middle of it. Untick Spoken punctuation commands when that matters, and the words are kept verbatim.
Which browsers support online speech to text?
Browser dictation is built on the Web Speech API, and support for it is uneven in a way that catches people out. Here is the honest state of it:
- Google Chrome (desktop and Android) — full support. This is the reference implementation and the one everything else is measured against.
- Microsoft Edge, Brave, Arc, Opera, Vivaldi — supported, because they are all Chromium underneath.
- Safari — partial. The API exists behind the
webkitSpeechRecognitionprefix, but sessions end quickly, continuous mode is unreliable, and results often stop arriving with no error. - Firefox — not implemented. The tool will tell you so rather than silently doing nothing.
Two other conditions are easy to miss. The page must be served over HTTPS — browsers refuse microphone access on a plain http:// origin, with localhost as the only exception. And the tab has to stay in the foreground: switch away and most browsers suspend recognition within a few seconds.
Voice typing in Hindi, Tamil and other Indian languages
The language menu above is not limited to English. Each of these pages opens the same tool with that language already selected, and explains what is different about dictating in it: the script the recogniser writes, the punctuation the language uses, and where else you can voice type it. Spoken punctuation commands are English-only, so in these languages you add punctuation by hand.
- Hindi Voice Typing
- Malayalam Voice Typing
- Tamil Voice Typing
- Marathi Voice Typing
- Kannada Voice Typing
- Telugu Voice Typing
- Bengali Voice Typing
- Gujarati Voice Typing
Where your audio actually goes
This is the part most free dictation pages leave out. This page has no server component and never posts your transcript anywhere — but the recognition itself is done by the browser, and Chrome performs it in the cloud. Your microphone audio is streamed to Google’s speech service, converted to text there, and sent back to the tab. That is why online dictation stops working the moment your connection drops, and why nobody can honestly describe a browser-based recogniser as offline or fully private.
For a shopping list or a blog paragraph, fine. For a client’s medical history, a legal note, an unreleased product spec or anything under an NDA, decide deliberately rather than by default. Any browser-based recogniser has this property, no matter how the page is worded.
Getting a usable first draft
- Keep the microphone about a hand’s width from your mouth and slightly off to one side, so plosives (“p”, “b”) do not thump the capsule.
- Speak in complete sentences. Recognition uses surrounding words as context, so half-sentences and long pauses in the middle of a clause produce worse text.
- Do not stop to correct a single word. Keep going and clean up at the end — you will finish faster and the engine will make fewer mistakes.
- Names, product names, jargon and acronyms are where every general-purpose engine struggles. Expect to fix them by hand here; a desktop tool with a custom vocabulary is the real fix.
- A wired headset or any dedicated microphone beats a laptop’s built-in array, especially in a room with hard surfaces.
- Spoken drafts run long — most people speak around 150 words a minute and type at a fraction of that. Run the result through the text cleaner before you send it, and if you want to know your own speaking pace, the voice typing test measures it against a set passage.
What a browser tab cannot do
This page is a demonstration of speech to text, not a way of working. The text only appears in this one text box, in this one tab. Every dictation ends with the same four steps: select, copy, switch app, paste. That is fine once. It is not fine forty times a day, and it is why online dictation never becomes a habit for most people.
Everything else it lacks follows from the same limitation. There is no custom vocabulary for the names you say constantly. There is no record of what you dictated last week. And the tab has to stay focused, so you cannot dictate into the thing you are actually looking at.
How VoiceSnap Pro handles the same job
VoiceSnap Pro is a voice-to-text dictation and voice-notes app for macOS and Windows. Hold one keyboard shortcut, speak, and punctuated text appears in whatever field your cursor is already in: an email, a ticket, a document, a chat. Your personal vocabulary keeps names and jargon spelled your way, and a second shortcut saves what you say as a voice note in your account, where you can tag it, file it in a folder, rework it with AI actions or have it remind you later. Nothing you dictate is used to train AI models.
It removes the copy-and-paste step this page still needs: the shortcut works anywhere on your machine, so the words land in a Gmail reply, a Jira ticket or a commit message directly. This page is genuinely useful too, and so are the other free tools: for caption files rather than prose there is the SRT to VTT converter, and the transcript cleaner tidies exports from other transcription tools.
Every account starts free, with 20 minutes of transcription, 50 AI actions and up to 20 notes, every feature and no card; Pro is $18 a month or $108 a year. Download free for Mac or Windows. The tool on this page stays free either way, with no account.
Questions people ask
It is free, and there is no account, no signup, no watermark and no usage limit. The tool is a single page of JavaScript talking to the speech engine already inside your browser, so there is nothing for us to meter.
No. This is live dictation from your microphone only. Browsers expose a live audio stream to the speech API and nothing else, so there is no way for a page like this one to accept an MP3, a WAV, an M4A or a video and return text. A recording needs a transcription service that does the work on a server.
Say it. “Comma”, “full stop”, “question mark”, “new line” and “new paragraph” are all recognised while the spoken-punctuation box is ticked, and the next sentence is capitalised for you. You can also just type the punctuation in afterwards — the box is an ordinary text field.
Browsers end a recognition session after a stretch of silence. This page restarts it automatically, which is why long dictations keep working, but a very long silence or a backgrounded tab can still end it. Press Start again and carry on — the text you already have is untouched.
Either permission was denied earlier, or the page is not on HTTPS. Click the padlock or microphone icon in the address bar, set the microphone to Allow, and reload. On macOS also check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and confirm your browser is listed and enabled.
Chrome on Android works. iOS is a different story: every iOS browser is Safari underneath, so support is the partial, unreliable kind described above. On an iPhone the built-in keyboard dictation key is a better bet.
No. Recognition happens on a server, so a dropped connection stops the transcript. Desktop dictation apps that run the model locally are the answer if offline matters to you.
On clear speech, a decent microphone and a quiet room, browser recognition is good enough that editing is faster than typing from scratch. Accuracy falls off sharply with background noise, several people talking, strong accents in a language variant you did not select, and any word the engine has never seen — which is most product names.
Yes — Save .txt writes the text to a plain text file with today’s date in the name, built in your browser from what is in the box. Nothing is uploaded to produce it. For subtitles rather than prose, the SRT to VTT converter handles caption files, and the transcript cleaner tidies exports from other tools.