Voice Memo to Text

The memo you recorded is easier to use as text

A voice memo is the fastest way to catch a thought — and the slowest way to find it again. Phones offer no search inside audio, so the idea you recorded walking home lives behind a filename like New Recording 47. As text it is searchable, quotable and pasteable into whatever you were going to write anyway.

Getting the file out of your phone

On iPhone, open Voice Memos, tap the recording, tap the three dots, then Share, then Save to Files. The result is an .m4a file. On Android, Samsung Voice Recorder and Google Recorder both save .m4a too; older recorder apps produce .3gp or .amr, and those are accepted here as well. Desktop recorders usually give you WAV or MP3. All of them work.

What the preview does

Your browser reads the file and keeps the first 5 minutes. A memo shorter than that is sent as-is; a longer one is cut in the browser and re-encoded as a 16 kHz mono WAV, so only the preview part is uploaded. The audio goes over an encrypted connection to the transcription engine behind the SozAI app (AssemblyAI), the language is detected automatically across 99 languages, and speakers are told apart when more than one person talks. Once the text is on your screen, the audio and transcript are deleted at the provider.

Formats and limits

• M4A, MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, OGG/OPUS, WEBM, plus 3GP and AMR from older Android recorders. Up to 25 MB.
• The first 5 minutes of each file; three previews per device per day.
• A 5-minute voice memo from an iPhone is about 4 MB — well inside every limit.

For everything after minute five

Lectures, interviews and hour-long brainstorms outgrow the preview. The SozAI app records or imports any length, labels the speakers, writes a summary and keeps every memo in a library you can search. Share a recording from Voice Memos or Files straight into the app. The first 30 minutes are free.