How to transcribe iPhone Voice Memos
Start with the free option, because a lot of people pay for something their phone already does. Since iOS 18, Voice Memos transcribes recordings by itself, on the phone, at no cost.
The part that trips people up is the requirement. Apple’s transcription needs an iPhone 12 or later running iOS 18 or newer - and it does not need Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence is a separate thing with much steeper requirements (iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 16 and later). On an iPhone 12, 13, 14 or a base 15 you get transcription without it. What Apple Intelligence adds, if you have it, is Writing Tools on top - summarising the transcript with a tap.
The tap path
For a recording you already have:
- Open Voice Memos (it lives in the Utilities folder).
- Tap the recording.
- Tap the more (…) button.
- Choose Copy Transcript to take the whole thing, or View Transcript if you want to select part of it and tap Copy.
Then paste it wherever you need it. Selecting a word in the transcript also moves the playhead to that point in the audio, which makes it a quick way to find the moment you were actually looking for.
You can watch it happen live, too: while recording, swipe up from the top of the waveform and tap the transcript icon. The waveform is replaced by text with the current word highlighted. Tap the icon again to go back.
Old recordings are covered as well. Apple’s documentation says that opening a recording made in iOS 17 or earlier triggers automatic transcription if it contains speech.
The ten languages
This is the first hard limit. Apple transcribes English (all variants), Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. That list has not grown since iOS 18. Apple also notes the feature “is not available in all countries or regions” without saying which.
If your recording is in any other language - Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Hindi - the phone will not transcribe it, and no setting will change that.
The three things it will not give you
Speaker labels. Apple documents nothing about identifying who is talking, and a transcript of a two-person interview arrives as one undifferentiated block of text. For a recorded conversation this is usually the thing that mattered most.
A file. The only documented ways out are Copy Transcript and View Transcript → Copy. It goes to the clipboard. There is no export to .txt, no .srt, no subtitle file - so no captions, and nothing you can hand to another tool without pasting it by hand first.
Timestamps in the text. The transcript is time-aligned inside the app, which is how tap-to-seek works, but the text you copy out carries no timecodes. If you need “she says that at 14:32”, you are noting it manually.
Getting the audio file itself off the phone
Sometimes you want the recording, not Apple’s transcript. Two documented routes:
Share. Tap the recording, tap the more button, tap Share, then open Options first. You get a choice between Rendered - “a single .m4a file with all audio effects and layers mixed in” - and Editable. Pick Rendered unless you have a specific reason not to. Then send it by AirDrop, Mail or anything else in the sheet.
Save to Files. Same path, but scroll down to Save to Files and pick a location. Apple’s note: “By default, recordings are exported in .m4a format.”
If Voice Memos is switched on in your iCloud settings, recordings sync to your iPad and Mac automatically, which is usually the least fiddly way to get at them on a computer.
When to transcribe it properly instead
Upload that .m4a to Speecho when you need any of the following, all of which are exactly the gaps above:
- Who said what. Speaker labels for an interview, a meeting, a two-person conversation.
- A language Apple does not do. Speecho handles 90+.
- Files, not clipboard. TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT and VTT, so the transcript can go into a document or the subtitles onto a video.
- Timestamps you can jump back to, and a summary of a long recording.
The first 15 minutes are free, and there is no subscription - M4A to text is the same flow with the format spelled out.
A note on recording in the first place
If you are recording on a laptop rather than a phone, our free voice recorder does the same job in a browser tab - no app, no account, and the audio never leaves your device. It hands you a file you can transcribe afterwards, the same way a voice memo does.
And whichever you use: recording other people usually requires their consent, and in some places the consent of everyone present. That rule does not change because the recorder was already in your pocket.
