Free AI transcription tools in India for audio, video and meetings

Published 2026-11-03, Updated 2026-11-03, 19 min read

If you have a recorded lecture, an interview, a client call, or a long voice note and you need it as text, you do not need to pay on day one. What you do need to know is that free transcription tools are not all free in the same way. Some give you a monthly minute allowance, some limit the number of files per day, some transcribe live meetings for free but charge credits for summaries and uploads, and one popular name is only a short trial dressed up as a free plan. Confusing those models is how people run out of minutes halfway through a recording.

The short answer for India is this: for audio and video files you already have, use TurboScribe free, which allows 3 files per day of up to 30 minutes each. For live meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, use Otter free, which gives 300 transcription minutes per month. If you regularly need more than that and you are comfortable installing software on your own computer, OpenAI Whisper is free and has no monthly cap at all, because it runs locally instead of on a company’s servers. Everything else in this article is useful for a specific job, not as a general replacement for those three.

This article is written for India on purpose: normal broadband and mobile data, Hindi and English speech, Indian accents and code-mixed Hinglish, and no assumption that you have a paid plan, a studio microphone, or a developer account. Every tool below works in India without a VPN. One warning applies to the whole category and is worth stating plainly: a transcript is not a perfect record. Names, numbers, and technical terms are the first things a free model gets wrong, so always check the text against the audio before you quote it, submit it, or act on it.

The short answer, in one table

Otter: the best free tool for live meetings

Otter is the tool to pick when the meeting is happening right now. Its free Basic plan includes live transcription for Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, speaker identification, audio recording playback, and apps for iOS and Android. The free allowance is 300 monthly transcription minutes, which covers about five hours of meetings per month. That is enough for a student attending a few online classes a week, or a freelancer with a handful of client calls, but it will not cover a full-time job’s daily meetings.

Otter’s free plan has a second, separate limit that catches people out: file imports. You get only 3 lifetime audio or video file imports on the free plan. In other words, Otter free is generous for live meetings and stingy for old recordings. If your job is mostly “transcribe this file I recorded yesterday,” Otter free is the wrong pick, and TurboScribe below is the right one. Otter’s pricing page lists multi-language support on the free plan, but it does not spell out Hindi in the snippet we verified, so if your meetings are mainly in Hindi, run a short Hindi test call through Otter before you depend on it for an important meeting.

Otter is genuinely useful for one more Indian use case: interviews and viva preparation. If you are practising for a job interview, recording a mock interview and reading the transcript shows you your filler words, your long pauses, and the questions you dodged. Our companion article on interview preparation tools covers that practice loop in more detail.

Notta: the best free tool for short clips with summaries

Notta’s free plan is smaller than Otter’s but more flexible for files. You get 120 transcription minutes per month, up to 3 minutes per conversation, 50 file uploads per month, and 10 AI summaries per month, with no credit card required. The 3-minute per-conversation cap is the important detail: Notta free is built for short clips, voice notes, and quick meeting notes, not for a 45-minute lecture in one go. If you split a long recording into short pieces, you can work around it, but that is tedious for regular use.

Where Notta earns its place is language support. Its help centre lists 58 languages for monolingual transcription, and Hindi is on that list, along with Gujarati and Kannada. That makes Notta the safest free pick in this article for a Hindi voice note or a short Hindi interview, because the Hindi support is stated explicitly rather than implied by a vague “multi-language” label. It also transcribes web meetings and identifies speakers, so a short team call in Hindi or English is a natural fit. For anything longer than a few minutes at a time, though, Notta free runs out fast, and you should look at TurboScribe or Whisper instead.

Fireflies: unlimited meetings, but read the credit rules

Fireflies is the most misunderstood free plan in this article, so it deserves a careful explanation. According to its own free-plan guide, auto-join transcriptions are unlimited on the free plan: if the Fireflies bot joins your meetings automatically, those meetings are transcribed without a minute limit. That sounds like the best free deal available, and for teams that live inside scheduled meetings, it genuinely is useful.

The catch is everything around the transcript. You get 400 minutes of storage per seat on the free plan, covering meeting recordings, uploads, and dialer calls, so old recordings have to be deleted to make room for new ones. And transcription credits power the extras: summarising a meeting and transcribing an uploaded file each cost credits, and you start with only a few, depending on how you signed up: 3 credits from the website bot, 5 from the Chrome extension, 10 as a new mobile app user, or 5 as an existing mobile app user. Fireflies Talk, its unlimited voice dictation in the desktop app, is included on every plan including free.

So the honest summary is this: Fireflies free is excellent if your main need is “the bot joins my meetings and I read the transcript afterwards,” and weak if your main need is “summarise every meeting” or “transcribe files I upload.” Do not buy or recommend it on the word “unlimited” alone. If you are a freelancer juggling client calls, our article on AI tools for freelancers explains how meeting notes fit into proposals, invoices, and follow-ups.

TurboScribe: the best free tool for files you already have

TurboScribe is the simplest tool in this article, and for file transcription it is the best free starting point. The free plan allows up to 3 files per day, each up to 30 minutes long, uploaded one file at a time, with all features included. That covers a daily lecture, a daily interview, or three voice notes a day, which is enough for most students and creators. It is powered by Whisper, and its default “Whale” mode is designed to maximise accuracy, taking only a few minutes to transcribe an hour of audio.

The limits are clear and easy to plan around. A file longer than 30 minutes cannot be uploaded on the free plan, so a 90-minute recording needs to be split first or transcribed elsewhere. Only one file uploads at a time, and bulk upload is a paid feature. The paid Unlimited plan costs 10 dollars per month billed annually or 20 dollars per month billed monthly, and raises the per-file limit to 10 hours. Before paying, check the pricing page, because prices and limits change, and a dollar price on a pricing page is not a rupee promise.

TurboScribe is also the right answer for a common Indian situation: a voice note or a recorded class in Hinglish. Because it runs on Whisper, which is a multilingual model, it handles Hindi and mixed Hindi-English speech better than tools that only promise English. Accuracy still drops with background noise, overlapping speakers, and very fast speech, so keep the phone close to the speaker and record in a quiet room when you can.

Descript: transcription plus editing, in one free hour

Descript is different from everything else here because transcription is not its only job. It turns audio and video into an editable text document, so you delete a sentence from the transcript and the matching audio or video is deleted too. That makes it the right tool when the transcript is a step toward a finished video or podcast, not the final product itself.

The free plan gives 60 media minutes per month, meaning one hour of imported or recorded media processed per editor per month. That is a small allowance: one podcast episode or two short videos, and the month is done. Paid plans add more minutes and watermark-free export, with the Hobbyist plan offering 600 minutes and the Creator plan 1800 minutes. If you only need a transcript and nothing else, Descript free is too small for regular use, and TurboScribe or Whisper will serve you better. If you need to cut filler words, remove mistakes, and publish a clean video, Descript’s one free hour is a good way to learn the workflow before paying.

Descript pairs naturally with the rest of a creator’s toolkit. If your transcript becomes captions for a video, our article on free AI video editing and captions tools covers that next step, and if the audio becomes a podcast, our article on AI tools for podcast and audio covers publishing. Do not confuse Descript’s media minutes with a transcription-only quota: the 60 minutes count the media you import or record, whatever you do with it afterwards.

Whisper: free, unlimited, and on your own computer

Whisper is OpenAI’s open-source speech recognition model, and it is the only tool in this article with no monthly cap, no account limit, and no company server in the middle. You install it on your own computer, point it at an audio or video file, and it produces text. It is multilingual, it can identify the language being spoken, and it can translate speech into English text as well as transcribe it in the original language. Hindi is within its multilingual ability, which is why it powers tools like TurboScribe.

The price of “free and unlimited” is setup and hardware. Whisper comes in six model sizes, from tiny at 39 million parameters needing about 1 GB of video memory, to large at 1550 million parameters needing about 10 GB. On a normal laptop without a graphics card, the small models run acceptably and the large model will be slow. You also need to be comfortable with a command line, because the standard installation is a Python package installed with pip. If that sentence does not scare you, Whisper is the best long-term answer in this article: no minutes to count, no files-per-day limit, and your recordings never leave your computer, which matters for sensitive interviews and private meetings.

Whisper’s weakness is the same as its strength. There is no support team, no meeting bot, and no summary button. You get a transcript file, and everything after that, summaries, speaker labels, and editing, is your job. For a student with a laptop and a folder full of recorded classes, that trade is excellent. For a team that wants a bot to join every meeting automatically, Otter or Fireflies will feel easier, and their free limits are the price of that convenience.

Sonix: a trial, not a free plan

Sonix deserves a short, honest section because it is easy to mistake for a free tool. Its pricing page offers a 30-minute free trial with no credit card required, and its plans claim 54 or more languages with an editor, translation, and AI analysis. That trial is genuinely useful for one thing: testing whether Sonix handles your accent, your audio quality, and your language well enough to be worth paying for. It is not a recurring free plan. Once the 30 trial minutes are used, further transcription is paid, on pay-as-you-go or subscription plans.

Treat Sonix the way you would treat a free sample in a shop: use it to decide, not to depend on. If your monthly need is small and occasional, the free tiers above will last longer. If your need is regular and professional, compare Sonix’s paid price against TurboScribe Unlimited and Descript’s paid plans on their official pricing pages before committing, because trial minutes and paid minutes are different products.

A free workaround: Google Docs voice typing

There is one more free option that is not a transcription tool at all, and it is worth knowing because it costs nothing and needs no new account. Google Docs voice typing lets you speak into a microphone in Chrome, Edge, or Safari and have the words typed into a document live. It is free, it works in India without a VPN, and it is genuinely useful for dictating notes, a draft, or an answer while you think aloud.

It is not file transcription. You cannot upload a recording and get text back; a human has to speak in real time. It also runs through your browser’s speech-to-text service, which processes the speech according to the browser’s own rules. Use it for dictation and first drafts, and use the tools above for recordings that already exist. If your main need is a voice for a video rather than text from audio, our article on free AI voice tools covers the other direction, text to speech.

Using transcription tools in India: language, payment, and no VPN

All the tools in this article work in India on normal broadband and mobile data, without a VPN. That matters because some AI tools quietly block Indian sign-ups or Indian payment methods, and none of the free tiers here showed that problem in our checks. Free tiers also mostly need no payment method: Notta states no credit card is required for its free plan, and Sonix asks for no card for its trial. Where a tool does ask for a card for a free trial, treat that as a warning sign and check what happens when the trial ends.

Language is where Indian users should be most careful. Hindi support is explicitly listed by Notta, among 58 languages that also include Gujarati and Kannada, and Whisper is multilingual including Hindi. Other tools describe their support only as “multi-language,” which is not a promise about Hindi. Before you trust any tool with an important Hindi recording, run a two-minute Hindi test file through it and read the result yourself. Code-mixed Hinglish, where a sentence starts in Hindi and ends in English, is harder than pure Hindi or pure English for every model here, and accuracy will vary with the speaker, the microphone, and the background noise.

Payment is the last India detail. Paid upgrades on these tools are priced in US dollars, not rupees, and the rupee amount on your card statement will depend on the exchange rate and your bank’s charges on the day. Free plans avoid all of that, which is another reason to exhaust them before paying. Prices and limits change, so re-check the official pricing or help page before paying or before promising a client a deadline that depends on a free limit.

What to avoid

Do not upload a recording you would not want leaked. Free cloud transcription sends your audio to a company’s servers, and the transcript may be stored under the free plan’s storage limit. For confidential interviews, legal discussions, or private family matters, prefer Whisper on your own computer, where the audio never leaves your machine. Do not record a meeting or a call without telling the other people on it; in a work setting, that is a trust problem even before it is a legal one.

Do not trust a raw transcript for numbers, names, medicine, or law. A model that hears “fifteen” as “fifty” has not made a small mistake if the number is a dose, a price, or a date. Always check the transcript against the audio for anything you will quote, submit, or act on. Do not buy a paid plan because a marketing page says “unlimited” without reading what is actually unlimited; Fireflies shows why, since its unlimited part is bot meeting transcription while summaries, uploads, and storage all have their own caps.

Do not use transcription to cheat an exam or an assessment that requires your own work, and do not present an AI transcript of someone else’s words as your own writing. A transcript is a record of what was said, not an essay you wrote. And do not pick a tool for one feature and then discover its real limit later: Otter’s 3 lifetime file imports, Notta’s 3 minutes per conversation, TurboScribe’s 30 minutes per file, and Descript’s 60 minutes per month are all limits that should decide your choice before you invest hours in one tool.

Frequently asked questions

Which free transcription tool is best for Hindi audio? Notta is the safest free pick for Hindi, because its help centre explicitly lists Hindi among 58 supported languages. Whisper is the strongest unlimited option for Hindi, since it is multilingual and runs on your computer. For other tools, run a short Hindi test file first, because “multi-language” on a pricing page is not a Hindi promise.

Can I transcribe a 2-hour recording for free? Not in one piece on any free cloud plan here. TurboScribe free caps each file at 30 minutes, Descript free gives 60 media minutes a month, and Notta free caps each conversation at 3 minutes. Split the recording into shorter files for TurboScribe, or use Whisper locally, which has no file-length cap beyond your computer’s ability.

Do these tools work on my phone? Otter has iOS and Android apps, and Fireflies has a mobile app whose sign-up route even affects your starting credits. TurboScribe, Notta, and Descript work through the browser on a phone, though uploading and editing long files is easier on a computer. Whisper needs a computer, not a phone, for practical use.

Is my recording private on a free plan? On cloud tools, your audio is uploaded to the company’s servers and stored under that plan’s storage limit, so it is not private in the way a file on your own computer is private. For sensitive recordings, use Whisper locally, where nothing leaves your machine. Always check the tool’s privacy page before uploading anything confidential.

What is the difference between live meeting transcription and file transcription? Live transcription listens as the meeting happens, usually through a bot that joins Zoom, Meet, or Teams, and produces text in real time. File transcription takes an audio or video file you already recorded and turns it into text afterwards. Otter free is generous with the first and stingy with the second, while TurboScribe only does the second.

Do I need to pay to download the transcript as text? On the free tiers covered here, downloading the transcript text itself is part of the free offer, and the limits are on minutes, files, or storage, not on downloading text. Paid plans mainly buy more minutes, longer files, summaries, and exports like watermark-free video. If a tool ever gates plain text download behind payment, that is a reason to switch, not to pay.

The final verdict, and a checklist before you pay

For audio files use TurboScribe free, for live meetings use Otter free, and for unlimited work run Whisper on your own computer. That one sentence is the whole article in miniature, and it holds up because each recommendation matches a different limit: TurboScribe’s daily file allowance fits files, Otter’s monthly minutes fit meetings, and Whisper’s local running fits everything else.

Before you pay for anything, run this checklist. First, test your actual audio, in your actual language, through the free tier, and read the transcript yourself. Second, count your real monthly need in minutes and files, and match it against the free limit, not against the marketing headline. Third, check whether the limit that matters to you is minutes, files per day, storage, or credits, because each tool caps a different thing. Fourth, re-check the official pricing page on the day you pay, because free limits and dollar prices change. And fifth, if the recording is sensitive, skip the cloud entirely and use Whisper locally. Pay only when a free limit genuinely blocks work you do every week, not because a trial ran out once.

Sources

• Otter pricing: https://otter.ai/pricing
• Notta pricing: https://www.notta.ai/en/pricing/
• Fireflies free plan guide: https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/4027724828-learn-about-the-fireflies-free-plan
• TurboScribe pricing: https://turboscribe.ai/pricing
• Descript pricing: https://www.descript.com/pricing
• Whisper repository: https://github.com/openai/whisper/
• Sonix pricing: https://sonix.ai/pricing
• Google Docs voice typing help: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/4492226?hl=en

Image credits:

• A man wearing headphones and typing on a laptop at home — Pexels by Kampus Production, Pexels License.
• A professional microphone and headphones in a recording studio — Pexels by Jakub Zerdzicki, Pexels License.
• A person writing notes in a notebook beside a laptop and documents — Pexels by Yan Krukau, Pexels License.