Written by Diogo Matos 
|
Last updated on 18 July 2025
WhatsApp voice notes are handy—until you're in a noisy office or need a quick transcript. Here's how to transcribe them using either WhatsApp's built-in feature or the free SpeedyAudios bot.
Of course! There's so many ways to use this. For example, when your friend sends you a 10-minute long audio and you... simply don't want to listen to it. It's also SUPER useful when you're in a noise place (a club, bar, metro, etc) and you can't listen to the audio.
But there's more. Maybe you're traveling and someone sends you an audio in a foreign language. Now you can transcribe and then translate it on Google Translate, for example.
The point is - better to have the option than to not have it, right?
If you thought WhatsApp's native transcript feature was the only option, you're wrong! Not only isn't it that good, as we'll see in a minute, there's other options for you.
WhatsApp recently rolled out native speech-to-text. It's handy for short clips, but it only works for your own language setting, caps out at 30-minute recordings, and has no export / copy-all button.
Falls a bit short of expectations, doesn't it?
SpeedyAudios uses AI to transcribe your audio, which means it can support over 50 languages. It's free, works on ANY device, and transcribes in seconds. It also supports multi-language audios (you know, when you're talking and you manage to fit some random foreign word into the audio).
While this feature seems good on paper, there's two major problems: First of all, it's not available for all users. I, for example, have yet gotten access to this feature, even though I have a new phone (iPhone 14).
Second, it's only available for your own language setting. So if you get an audio in a foreign language, you're out of luck.
Plus, it fails at transcribing multiple languages at once. If you send an audio containing words in a different language, it will fail to transcribe them.
Finally, the numnber of languages it transcribes is actually quite limited. It's not even close to the 50+ languages that SpeedyAudios supports.
So now that we know this - what are the alternatives?
Ok, so you got an audio from a friend. Here's how you can transcribe it:
Let's say you're on Android. Here's how you can transcribe it:
Using WhatsApp on your laptop? Weird, but okay. Here's how you do it:
Still have questions and prefer to use the native feature? Watch this video to know how to do it: