How to transcribe WhatsApp voice messages
Someone sends you a six-minute voice note and you are on a train, or in a meeting, or simply not in the mood. WhatsApp has had a fix for this since November 2024: it transcribes voice messages into text on your own phone. It is free, it is genuinely private, and it is off until you turn it on.
It is also considerably more limited than most people realise, and the limits differ sharply between iPhone and Android.
Turning it on
On Android: Settings → Chats → turn on Voice Message Transcripts → tap Choose language and pick the language most of your voice messages are in → tap Set up now, or Wait for Wi-Fi if you would rather not spend mobile data. That last step downloads a speech model to the phone.
On iPhone: Settings (or your profile picture) → Chats → turn on Voice Message Transcripts → Choose language → Change to {language}.
iPhone has one extra requirement that catches people out: you need iOS 16 or newer and Siri switched on. WhatsApp’s transcription on iOS is built on Apple’s speech models, so with Siri disabled the feature has nothing to run on.
To read a transcript, tap and hold a voice message and choose Transcribe, then expand it with the chevron. It can take a moment to appear. Only the recipient sees the transcript - the sender cannot.
The catch: four languages on Android, twenty on iPhone
This is the single most important thing to know, and it is stated plainly in WhatsApp’s own documentation.
Android supports four languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. That is the whole list.
iPhone supports twelve on iOS 16 - English, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish - and twenty on iOS 17 or later, adding Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Malay, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai.
So a German or Italian speaker on Android cannot transcribe WhatsApp voice notes at all, while the same person on an iPhone can. It is an awkward gap, and it exists because the two platforms use different underlying speech engines.
Why yours says “Transcript unavailable”
WhatsApp lists three causes, and the first is the one that catches nearly everyone:
- Your transcript language setting does not match the language of the voice message. The feature works in one preselected language at a time. In a bilingual friendship or a multilingual family group, half the messages will simply fail until you go back into settings and switch.
- Some words are not recognised, often because of background noise.
- The language of the voice message is not supported - see the lists above.
WhatsApp also says outright that “it is possible that voice message transcripts are inaccurate,” which is a fair warning for something running entirely on a phone.
It does not work on WhatsApp Web or desktop
If you mostly use WhatsApp on a laptop, this feature is not there. WhatsApp’s own help article has no instructions on its Web tab, and its companion article about Channels states that voice transcripts are not supported on linked devices including WhatsApp Web, Mac and Windows.
You will find blog posts claiming you can right-click a voice message on WhatsApp Web and transcribe it. There is no official support for that, and we could not find any WhatsApp source confirming it.
The privacy part, which is genuinely good
WhatsApp says transcripts are “generated on your device so that no one else, not even WhatsApp, can hear or read your personal messages,” and that personal voice messages stay protected by end-to-end encryption.
Two details suggest this is literal rather than marketing: setup downloads a language model to the phone, and the iOS version requires Siri, which does its speech work locally. That is what on-device transcription looks like from the outside.
One scoping note: that claim is about personal messages. Voice updates on Channels are public by design, so it does not extend to those.
When you need more than the phone can do
The built-in feature is for reading one message quickly. It is not built for keeping, searching or translating, and there are four situations where it simply stops:
- A language it does not cover. Especially on Android, where the list is four items long. Speecho handles 90+.
- You need the text as a file. WhatsApp documents no way to export or save a transcript.
- Someone sent something long and important - a legal instruction, a client brief, a recorded interview - and you want a document with timestamps rather than a block of text under a chat bubble.
- It is in a language you do not speak. Transcription plus translation in one pass is a different job from reading a transcript in the original.
To do any of those you need the audio file rather than the chat bubble. A WhatsApp voice message is Opus audio in an Ogg container - Meta’s own developer documentation specifies “OPUS codecs only, mono input only” for WhatsApp audio - and in practice it arrives as a .opus file. Forward or share the message out to Files, Mail or Drive, then upload it. Speecho accepts .opus directly, so there is nothing to convert.
WhatsApp’s Export chat does exist (open the chat → contact or group name → Export chat on iPhone; ⋮ → More → Export chat on Android), but be warned that it attaches only the most recent media rather than the whole history, and it hands you a ZIP with the voice notes unlabelled. For one or two messages, sharing them individually is far less work.
The first 15 minutes are free - voice message transcription covers the whole flow. And if you would rather just get through the message faster, our audio speed changer plays it at up to 3x with the pitch kept normal.
One thing worth saying
A voice message someone sent you privately is theirs as much as yours. Reading it is one thing; running it through a service, keeping the transcript, or forwarding it onward is another. Everything above assumes the sender would not be surprised - and if you are not sure, the honest move is to ask them.
