M4A to text — straight from your iPhone

Every Voice Memo an iPhone makes is an M4A file. Interviews recorded on your phone, meeting notes muttered on the walk home, song ideas, lecture snippets — they all pile up in that one app, unsearchable. Getting them into text used to mean finding a converter, then a transcription service, then trusting both.

Here it is one step: AirDrop or download the memo to this device, drop it on the tool, read the transcript. Your files are never uploaded — everything runs on your device.

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How to transcribe a voice memo

  1. Get the M4A onto this device

    From the Voice Memos app, share the recording — AirDrop to a Mac, or save to Files/Drive and open it here. No format conversion is needed.

  2. Drop it on the tool

    M4A/AAC decodes natively in the browser. Short memos transcribe in moments; longer recordings stream their transcript progressively.

  3. Copy or export the text

    Fix any misheard words inline, then copy the plain text into notes, or export TXT/SRT/VTT/JSON if you need files.

Phone recordings, handled properly

Apple formats native

M4A and AAC play everywhere Safari and Chrome do — so they transcribe here without any converter apps or command-line tools.

Personal audio stays personal

Voice memos are often half-private thoughts. They are transcribed on your device and never uploaded — there is no server to trust.

Quick for short clips

A two-minute memo is a few moments of processing on a typical laptop. No queue, no waiting for a slot on someone’s GPU.

M4A and Voice Memo questions

How do I get a Voice Memo off my iPhone?
Open Voice Memos, tap the recording, use the share sheet: AirDrop it to a Mac, save it to the Files app, or send it through any cloud drive you already use — then open this page on that device and drop the file in.
Can I use this on the iPhone itself?
Modern iOS Safari can run the tool. Larger models are heavy on phone memory, so a laptop is smoother today — the smaller models are the pragmatic choice on a phone.
Are M4A files from other apps supported?
Yes. M4A is the same AAC audio regardless of which recorder produced it — Android apps, dictation devices, and desktop editors included.
What does the transcription?
OpenAI’s open-source Whisper model, running locally in your browser. Your memo is never uploaded to reach it.
Is there a length or file count limit?
No. Transcribe one memo or a hundred, back to back. Everything runs on your own hardware, so there is nothing for us to cap.
How can I check that my M4A file is not being uploaded?
Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and start a transcription with it open. On the first run you will see the Whisper model download once — about 80 MB for the standard model, less or more if you pick a different one — and after that it is served from your browser's cache. What you will not see, on any run, is a request carrying your M4A file. Then sort that list by size: the largest thing the page sends is a few kilobytes of analytics, nowhere near the size of an M4A. This page loads analytics and advertising like most websites do, which is why the claim is scoped precisely: your files are never uploaded.