Recommended Models

Top picks for different use cases — free, accurate, private, or fast.

Here are our top picks for different use cases. All cloud providers listed here have free tiers — you can get started without paying anything.

Best Free Option

Groq — Free forever with rate limits. No credit card, no expiration. Uses Whisper Large on Groq's ultra-fast LPU hardware. Transcription is nearly instant, even for long recordings. Supports 100+ languages.

This is our #1 recommendation for most users. Sign up takes 30 seconds.

Best for Privacy

Whisper or Parakeet — everything stays on your device. No internet connection needed, no data sent anywhere. Among Whisper options, we recommend Large Turbo. Both Whisper and Parakeet are free and work fully offline.

Best Accuracy

Cohere Transcribe — Best-in-class 5.4 Word Error Rate, the lowest among all cloud providers. Free trial tier, no credit card required. Supports 14 languages (no auto-detect).

Deepgram Nova-3 — Excellent accuracy with 100+ language support. New accounts get $200 in free credits (no expiration).

ElevenLabs Scribe v2 — Excellent accuracy across 92+ languages with a free tier available.

Best for Older iPhones

Groq — Local models require modern hardware to run smoothly. If your iPhone struggles with on-device transcription, Groq offloads all compute to the cloud. You get fast, accurate results regardless of your device.

Best Multilingual

ElevenLabs Scribe v2 — supports 99 languages with excellent accuracy across all of them, including less common languages.

Whisper Large (local or cloud via Groq) — supports 100+ languages with good accuracy across most.

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