Audio & Video to Text Transcription (Whisper): Speech to Text

What does Audio & Video to Text Transcription (Whisper) do?

Audio & Video Transcriber converts speech in audio and video files (MP3, MP4, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, WEBM, MOV and more) into text, timestamped segments and ready-to-use SRT / WebVTT subtitles. It supports 99 languages, detects the language automatically, and can also translate speech to English.

Use it as a speech to text API, audio to text converter, video to text transcriber, podcast transcript generator or SRT subtitle generator: no OpenAI key required.

It runs open-source Whisper (faster-whisper) directly on Apify, so there is no OpenAI key, no per-request API fee and no data sent to third parties. You pay per minute of audio, and failed or silent files are never billed.

Use it from the Apify Console, the API, schedules and integrations (Make, Zapier, n8n), or let AI agents call it through the Apify MCP server ("transcribe this podcast episode and summarize it").

Why use it?

• 🎙️ Podcasts: type a podcast name, or paste an Apple Podcasts link or RSS feed, and get the latest episodes transcribed, with podcast name, episode title and date. Schedule it to transcribe every new episode automatically.
• 🧑‍💼 Meetings and calls: turn recordings into text, and optionally get an AI summary, chapters and action items (Claude, with your own Anthropic key).
• 🎯 Custom vocabulary: give names, brands and jargon so they are spelled right.
• 🎬 Videos and courses: generate SRT/VTT subtitles with accurate timestamps.
• 🤖 RAG and AI pipelines: get timestamped chunks with token counts, ready for LLMs and vector databases.
• 🔗 Paste any link: direct file URLs, or Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and GitHub share links.
• 🌍 Multilingual content: transcribe in the original language or translate to English in one step.

How to transcribe an audio or video file

1. Click Try for free.
2. Paste direct links to your media files (for example a podcast .mp3 or a meeting .mp4).
3. Pick a model: base (fast, recommended) or small (most accurate).
4. Click Start. Download the transcripts as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or fetch them via API.

Input

Field	Description	Default
sources	Direct URLs of audio/video files	—
base64Files	Short files without a URL: [{"fileName": "memo.m4a", "content": "<base64>"}]	—
podcastFeeds / maxEpisodesPerFeed	Podcast names, Apple Podcasts links or RSS feeds; the newest N episodes of each are transcribed	— / 3
onlyNewEpisodes	Skip episodes already transcribed in earlier runs (for schedules)	true
model	base, small or tiny	base
language	ISO code (en, es, de…) or auto	auto
task	transcribe or translate (to English)	transcribe
outputs	Any of text, markdown (paragraphs with [HH:MM:SS] times), segments, srt, vtt, chunks	text, segments
vocabulary	Names and terms to favour, e.g. ["Apify", "Dr. Nguyen"]	—
aiInsights + anthropicApiKey	AI title, summary, key points, chapters, action items and topics	false
saveFiles	Also save .txt, .srt and .vtt files with download links (in files)	false
wordTimestamps	Start/end time for every word	false
skipSilence	Skip silent parts (faster, fewer hallucinations)	true
maxDurationMinutes	Only transcribe (and bill) the first N minutes of each file	240

{
  "sources": [{ "url": "https://example.com/podcast/episode-42.mp3" }],
  "model": "base",
  "language": "auto",
  "outputs": ["text", "segments", "srt"]
}

Output

One record per file. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

{
  "source": "https://example.com/podcast/episode-42.mp3",
  "status": "ok",
  "model": "base",
  "language": "en",
  "languageProbability": 0.99,
  "durationSeconds": 1834.2,
  "transcribedSeconds": 1834.2,
  "billedMinutes": 31,
  "text": "Welcome to the show. Today we talk about...\n\nOur guest is...",
  "segments": [{ "start": 0.0, "end": 4.2, "text": "Welcome to the show." }],
  "srt": "1\n00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,200\nWelcome to the show.\n",
  "insights": { "title": "Scaling data teams", "summary": "…", "keyPoints": ["…"], "chapters": [{ "start": "00:00:00", "title": "Intro" }, { "start": "00:07:42", "title": "Hiring" }], "actionItems": ["Send the hiring rubric to Ana"], "topics": ["data engineering"] },
  "stats": { "processingSeconds": 262.1, "speedFactor": 7.0, "segments": 412, "words": 5210 },
  "warnings": []
}

How much does transcription cost?

Pay per event, with no subscription:

Event	Price
Run start (per GB of memory, default 4 GB)	$0.0005
Audio minute, base or tiny model	$0.006 ($0.36 per hour)
Audio minute, small model	$0.012 ($0.72 per hour)
AI insights per file (only with aiInsights; Claude usage is billed to your own key)	$0.01

A 30-minute podcast with the base model costs about $0.18. Each started minute is billed; failed files and files with no speech are free. Set Max cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at that limit.

How accurate is it? Whisper tiny vs base vs small

We measured the three models ourselves, with the same code this Actor runs:

Model	Word error rate (lower is better)	Speed on Apify (default 4 GB)	Price per minute
tiny	11.3%	about 20–30× faster than real time	$0.006
base (default)	8.2%	about 11× faster than real time	$0.006
small	5.4%	about 4× faster than real time	$0.012

Word error rate was measured on 73 clean English recordings from the LibriSpeech test set (8.6 minutes of audio). Speed was measured on a 2.6-minute speech recording in Apify runs (tiny: scheduled test runs). Accents, background noise and other languages give higher error rates, so choose small for those. A 60-minute file takes about 5–6 minutes with base and about 15 minutes with small.

Use it with AI agents (MCP): Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor

This Actor works as a tool for AI agents through the Apify MCP server. Add it to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or any MCP client with this server URL:

https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fguiraud/audio-video-transcriber

Then just ask in plain language, for example:

• "Transcribe this podcast episode and summarise it: https://example.com/episode.mp3"
• "Transcribe the 3 newest episodes of this podcast feed and list the main topics"
• "Make Spanish SRT subtitles for this video: https://example.com/talk.mp4"

Smallest useful input for an agent:

{
  "sources": [{ "url": "https://example.com/episode.mp3" }],
  "outputs": ["text"]
}

• Asking only for text keeps the answer short; add segments or srt when timestamps are needed.
• maxDurationMinutes caps the length (and cost) of each file.
• Set language when you know it: it avoids misdetection on short clips.

Agents pay per result like everyone else (Apify also supports agentic payments), so there is no subscription to set up.

Agent-friendly input: common field names such as url, urls, startUrls, query or keywords are accepted, and an empty input runs a small sample from the input form (with a note in the results) instead of failing.

Tips

• Long batches are safe: if the platform restarts or migrates the run, files already transcribed are skipped, so no minute is charged twice.
• Speed: see the table above. More memory gives the run more CPU cores, so results arrive sooner at the same cost per minute.
• Accuracy: use small for accents, noisy recordings, music in the background and most non-English languages.
• Set language when you know it; auto-detection can be wrong on very short or noisy clips.
• For subtitles, add srt or vtt to outputs and enable wordTimestamps if you need per-word timing.

Related tools

• TikTok, Instagram Reels, X or Facebook videos? Video to Text Transcriber takes the link (or a whole TikTok account) and returns the transcript with views and likes. For many short videos, Instagram Reels Transcript Scraper and TikTok Transcript Scraper are priced per video.
• Transcribing podcasts? Podcast Transcript Scraper takes just the podcast name or its Apple Podcasts link and returns a table of episodes with their transcripts.
• Transcribing YouTube videos? YouTube Transcript Scraper returns the captions of any video or Short as text, SRT or Markdown in seconds, for a fraction of the cost of transcribing the audio.

FAQ and limitations

• Readable subtitles: set subtitleMaxChars (e.g. 42) to re-cut SRT/VTT into broadcast-style subtitles (2 lines, max 6 s per subtitle). For subtitle-only jobs see SRT Subtitle Generator.

• TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook or YouTube links? This Actor needs a direct link to a media file or a podcast. For TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook links use Video to Text Transcriber (same price per minute); for YouTube, YouTube Transcript Scraper.

• Transcribe every new episode automatically: create an Apify schedule with your podcast feed. With onlyNewEpisodes (on by default) episodes transcribed in earlier runs are skipped, so you only pay for new ones.

• Speaker names? Speaker diarization (who said what) is not included yet.

• Privacy: files are processed inside your own Apify run and deleted when it ends; nothing is sent to external AI APIs.

• Accuracy depends on audio quality. Whisper can occasionally produce wrong words in silence or music; skipSilence reduces this.

Questions or feature requests? Open an issue in the Issues tab. If this Actor saved you time, a quick review on this page helps other users find it. Thank you!