Speech to Text API: Audio, Video & Podcast Transcription

Turn audio, video and podcast episodes into text with Whisper AI, in 99 languages. Paste links to files, podcast feeds or Apple Podcasts pages and get back a clean transcript, timestamps, SRT and VTT subtitles, the detected language, and optionally an English translation.

No API key, no OpenAI account, no subscription: pay per audio minute.

Why this one?

• Podcasts built in. Paste a podcast RSS feed or an Apple Podcasts link and it finds the newest episodes for you, with title, show and date.
• Subtitles ready to use. SRT, VTT and TXT files for every transcript, with download links.
• 99 languages, detected automatically, or translated to English in the same run.
• Video too. The audio track is taken from MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and more.
• You stay in control of the cost. A per-file minute cap and the run's spending limit are respected, and files that fail are free.
• Private. Files are deleted after transcription and never used for training.

Use cases

• Podcasters and media: show notes, blog posts, quotes and searchable archives of every episode.
• Video creators: subtitles for YouTube, Reels and TikTok uploads from your own files.
• AI pipelines: feed transcripts to ChatGPT, Claude or your RAG system to summarize, tag or answer questions.
• Sales and support: transcribe call recordings to review objections and quality.
• Research and journalism: interviews, lectures, hearings and focus groups as text.
• Market monitoring: track what is said about your brand or sector in podcasts every week.

Input

Field	What it does
Audio, video or podcast links	Direct file links, podcast RSS feeds, Apple Podcasts links, Dropbox or Google Drive share links, or pages with an audio player.
Quality	Fast (Whisper base) or Accurate (Whisper small).
Spoken language	Auto-detect, or pick it to make short clips more reliable.
Translate to English	Output English whatever language is spoken.
Episodes per podcast	How many of the newest episodes of each feed to transcribe.
Only episodes published since	Optional date filter for feeds.
Max minutes per file	Cap per file, so a 5-hour recording doesn't surprise you.
Names and terms	Brands, names and jargon so Whisper spells them right.

{
  "urls": [
    "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml",
    "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736",
    "https://example.com/interview.mp3"
  ],
  "maxEpisodesPerFeed": 3,
  "quality": "fast",
  "language": "auto"
}

Output

One row per file:

{
  "title": "Politicians are afraid to fix taxes. So 100 citizens tried.",
  "podcast": "Planet Money",
  "publishedAt": "2026-10-28T12:57:50Z",
  "language": "en",
  "durationSec": 2059.9,
  "minutesCharged": 35,
  "words": 5480,
  "text": "This is Planet Money from NPR...",
  "segments": [{"start": 0.0, "end": 4.96, "text": "This is Planet Money from NPR."}],
  "srtUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/001-Politicians-are-afraid.srt",
  "vttUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/001-Politicians-are-afraid.vtt",
  "txtUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../records/001-Politicians-are-afraid.txt",
  "model": "whisper-base",
  "mediaUrl": "https://.../episode.mp3"
}

Links that can't be transcribed are skipped (not charged) and listed in the FAILED_URLS record.

Good to know

• Charged per started minute of audio actually transcribed. Silence at the start and end still counts as audio.
• Speakers are not labeled (no diarization).
• Very noisy audio, music and overlapping speakers lower accuracy; Accurate quality helps.
• Speech recognition: OpenAI Whisper (MIT license) running on faster-whisper.

Integrations

Schedule it daily on a podcast feed with Only episodes published since and send new transcripts to Google Sheets, Notion, Slack, Make, Zapier or n8n.

How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Start) at the top of this page.
2. Fill in the input, or keep the example to see it working in seconds.
3. Click Start and wait for the run to finish.
4. Download the results as Excel, CSV, JSON or HTML, or get them through the Apify API.

How much does it cost?

$0.005 per audio minute ($5.00 per 1,000). No start fee, no monthly fee, and only the minutes actually transcribed are charged. That is Fast quality, cheaper than the OpenAI Whisper API; Accurate quality is $0.01 per minute.

Example	Cost
A 1-hour podcast episode	about $0.30
A 10-minute video with subtitles	about $0.05
100 sales calls of 5 minutes	about $2.50

Apify's free plan includes monthly credit, so you can try it for free.

FAQ

Which files and links work?

MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, Opus, MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and more, by direct link, plus podcast RSS feeds, Apple Podcasts links, Dropbox and Google Drive share links and web pages with an audio player.

Does it work with YouTube, TikTok or Spotify?

No. Those sites block automated downloads. Use a direct link to the file, the podcast RSS feed or its Apple Podcasts page instead.

Which languages are supported?

The 99 languages of Whisper, detected automatically, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi. It can also translate any of them to English.

Fast or Accurate?

Fast (Whisper base) is great for clear speech and English. Accurate (Whisper small) is better for other languages, accents, noise and jargon.

Can I get subtitles?

Yes. Every transcript comes with timestamped segments and download links for SRT, VTT and TXT files.

Is my audio stored or used for training?

No. Files are downloaded to the run, transcribed and deleted. Only the transcript is saved, in your own Apify storage.

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Support

Need speaker labels, another format or a site that doesn't work? Open an issue on the Issues tab.

If this Actor saves you time, a quick ⭐ review helps a lot and keeps it maintained. Thank you!