Drag in audio or video and get an accurate, speaker-labelled transcript — running OpenAI's Whisper models entirely on your Mac.
MacWhisper wraps OpenAI's Whisper speech-recognition models in a clean native app. Drop in a file — or record a call, a meeting, or system audio — and get a transcript you can search, edit, and export, without anything leaving your machine.
Why it makes the list
Local transcription used to mean the command line. MacWhisper makes it a two-second drag-and-drop, with a side-by-side editor, speaker detection, and translation built in. It is fast on Apple silicon, it handles dozens of languages, and the privacy story is simple: the audio never touches a server.
Standout features
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On-device Whisper models, from tiny to large-v3, with Apple silicon acceleration
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System-audio and microphone recording, including automatic meeting capture
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Speaker recognition that labels who said what
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Built-in editor with search-and-replace and word-level timestamps
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Export to SRT, VTT, CSV, plain text, and Markdown
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AI prompts for summaries and translations of any transcript
Pricing
The free tier covers smaller models and short files. A one-time Pro license (around $59) unlocks the largest models, batch processing, recording, and the AI features.