Aiko Reviews

by Kyle Erhabor

It can take an audio file and transcribe its contents well, but the size and performance of Aiko kill its use for anything practical. I took a ~20 minute mp3 from a video and tried transcribing it, and it only managed to transcribe a few dozen sentences from the beginning after 3-5 minutes of running (with max CPU usage). I'd like to try it again some time in the future when it's improved.

by DrProctor

I love Aiko because it allows me to record my short staff huddles that are held in a noisy environment on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. It catches more words than I can, and after taking 4 min or so to process the recording, it provides a largely accurate transcript. I’ve also been able to record foreign languages and have the words translated into English. The translations aren’t always clear, but that happens often with app translating in general. The problem: it often flakes out before I can save the transcript, due to not working in the background. If a call comes in or the display sleeps or screen changes, there goes all that data. It’s a fatal flaw that has me looking for a different AI transcription app, unfortunately.
The problem of repeating words/phrases isn’t a huge problem, but can take up a lot of line that I have to delete.

If they fix the crashes, I’ll promote this to the high heavens.

by Lishkoburger12

I'm an author looking for an alternate to Dragon Transcription from Nuance, and so far I like what I see! I wish there was a way to include words I've grown accustomed to dictating like Open Quote, Close Quote, New Line and a few others. When these get added/updated, five stars. Until then, great app. Keep up the good work!

by Neotint

This is the only quality and privacy respecting Whisper-based transcrioption tool . Other apps add commercial survellance to gather meta data about you, this app doesn't! Its interface is... minimalist... and it just gets the job done. Available on iOS and macOS. Longer audio files may require macOS version. The ability to locally and privately on-device transcribe a wide variety of English accents is amazing. Many work or research contexts require high integrity private use of meeting recordings. Aiko supports many use cases where speed and privacy is paramount.

by RealSlimSlavin

I want to love this, but every time my screen closes/sleeps during a transcription event, all progress is lost. I appreciate what Aiko makes possible, but long-term utility/functionality is lost due to such issues.

by Willy Mc Nilly Ttttt

Most transcription apps are expensive. This is free. Selecting the correct language rather than using auto detect seems to help. Although it produces some redundancies when I upload long voice memos, using ChatGPT, copy and paste to, is a great way to clean things up. Thanks for creating Aiko and making it free

by Grumpy Old Hepcat

I obtained usable transcripts from a recording with many people talking at multiple volumes. Was it flawless? No. But it was incredibly good and better than I could possible do transcribing it manually. I can't seem to include the time stamps when saving the transcript. That would be a great improvement.

by Mgilbuena

This is absolutely fantastic. Now one can simply speak in your natural language without having to say “comma, question mark, period.” I use Aiko to dictate journal entries and then paste into my app. This has solved the frustration of typing on a phone, and simply provide a stream-of-consciousness to my journals. Absolutely brilliant. Be sure to customize the settings so that Aiko knows the correct spelling for words you often say “I.e Hayley vs Haley” local transcription? Wooooow!!!!

by Somagiri

I have been using it to transcribe some notes that are in English with Sanskrit words. After many pages, I have so far only found one mistake, and, surprisingly, none were in the Sanskrit. This is really well done. My only gripe is that the transcription leaves two lines between each sentence, which means I take it over to ChatGPT and have the extra lines replaced with spaces as I really don't want 3 times as many pages. There are hundreds of pages to transcribe, which is enough already. I wish they would make a setting for spacing between sentences.

by Nutronn

I used it the first time to transcribe a voice memo recorded on my iPhone that was 24 minutes long. I saved it to files and opened it with Aiko. It took a few minutes but transcribed it almost perfectly and the recording was not the greatest quality. Super impressed. Would be worth a few dollars for sure if the developer decides to monetize this.

Note to developer: Thanks and GREAT JOB 👏

by Techluver

I often have to record something on my phone, then, transcribe it, I was using a different service for this, but that cost money. Every time I was using the transcriptions, and it took a while to come back. This is wonderful, it can do it on device, I knew something like this was going to come out when I saw the whisper model last year, but back, then it could only run on the computer, and this is so much better. I have both versions, the one for my Mac, and one for my phone, and they both are wonderful, one for when I’m sitting down and one for when I’m on the go.

by Chaimk

This is a simple app with not a lot of options and a spartan interface. But it provides really impressive results. I compared it to the "Large" model in the Whisper Transcription app and this app provided much better results in terms of punctuation and grouping sentences from one speaker. (I was transcribing an interview.)

As a free app it is a tremendous contribution to the Mac community. Thank you, Sindre Sorhus!

by Lunaluxe012

I'm not one to usually write reviews, but I am truly blown away by Aiko. I've tried a few alternatives with very spotty results, but this app seems to always get (most) of it right! I always go back over results to transcribe for videos I make, and I've spent significantly less time on it now that Aiko is in my life. Thanks a million!

by Daniroc360

Aiko was done right. When first being opened up it didn’t ask for a million permissions. It was easy to use and best of all they leveraged local processing of language model to transcribe audio instead of a third party or sending to a remote data processing location. Hats off to the engineers for making a usable tool.

by Donman78

Just existing gets Aiko 5 stars right now. Not to take anything away from Aiko - it is a simple, serviceable stopgap until Apple finally gets serious about system-wide transcribing and captioning. (Google is so far ahead of Apple right now, it is shameful.) A 50 second voice recording I tested took about 20 seconds to transcribe on my M1 Pro with 16GB.

by Fdcases

The this app app impressed me. It uses Whisper and surpasses other apps like Otter, which I have used for several years. this app provided highly accurate transcriptions, even in challenging audio conditions.

I really liked that it captured technical terms, acronyms, and speech nuances. I also liked that it parsed the text rather than providing a hard-to-read massive text block.

Congrats to Aiko developer for a great job!

by Y2Kbotz

Aiko is super straightforward and does exactly what I’ve always needed. The transcripts it generates are typically extremely accurate, and the ability to export to lots of different kinds of files is really helpful and makes this tool even more versatile. My only complaint is that I can’t tip the developer for making my life so much easier with Aiko.

by Lorlw

Really appreciate your excellent free apps. Being able to transcribe important conversations (with permission of course) comes in so handy since my memory isn’t what it used to be! While I wish it tracked different speakers and retained recordings automatically so transcriptions don’t get lost if interrupted, I have realistic expectations of a free app and appreciate all that it does do!!!

by Peetah61

The only word really needed to review this wonderful app. The quality of transcripts generated, and their translation, rivals paid services. I have only learned about this app recently and would have loved that to have happened earlier. this app is incredibly easy to use and incredibly helpful. Capturing, documenting and translating the spoken word for use in a myriad use-cases is a great time-saver and productivity booster. Thank you!

by JP The Navigator

Truly an achievement.

We have hours of voice memo recorded interviews. We have tired numerous methods of transcription. This gives a VERY accurate transcription quickly. Well done!

As to speed, it took only 4 minutes to convert a 23 minute voice memo on 14" MBPro M1Pro. I did this in the background while doing other word processing type tasks. This is a GPU intensive process.

A note on the known problem. The conversion can get stuck in a loop. This is apparently in the AI Module the developer uses and is out of his direct control. This only appeared about 2 hours into a 3 hour voice memo. I have broken the large recordings into smaller ones and have not experienced the problem since.

by Happy Aiko User

I had concerns with the low number of reviews and the fact that it was completely completely free.
I’m incredibly happy to be found wrong..
I’m sure I’ll run into some quirks as well as the ones the developer has listed, but free, helpful, and accurate?
This takes us back to the old days of developers doing good work because they can!

by Wh0isdsmith

Listen, I don’t ever take the time wrote reviews but somehow Aiko has been the best audio transcription app out there, at least for what I use it for, which has been for getting the lyrics from audio stems. I have tried so many apps and services both paid and free and at best even the top paid ones had about 60% accuracy. With Aiko I used it on 25 vocal tracks with 90-95% accuracy and this service is free?! What?! Thank you to whoever made this you truly rock!

by Fred.pan

Hey there! I just wanted to say that I gave the Chinese and English voice input a try and it was really impressive. As someone with a heavy Asian accent when speaking English, I was really impressed that this app was able to transcribe everything perfectly. And let me tell you, processing a 200MB video file usually takes forever, but this app does it in just around 30 seconds! Amazing, right?
It would be even more perfect if Chinese could have formatting options similar to those in English.👻👻👻

by Eskinner42

I've tried and rejected speech-to-text products for years, Apple's built-in and commercial ($) packages included.
Trying "yet another" product, I was absolutely stunned with this app's accuracy! It didn't miss a word in what I considered a challenging dictation, intuitively added periods--from my tone of delivery? Or longer pauses? I don't know--and put commas where I felt they should be, and omitted them where I didn't.
I'm a novelist and hate editing, and when this app gave me a near-perfect transcription, I was "sold" on this free product.
Well done!

by Pand4i

I cannot tell how it would perform with 16 GB's, but even with 8, it was able to transcribe speech where I mixed English words with a language spoken by less than 10 million natives. It is somewhat slow with transcribing audio files (at least on 8 GB's) but the luxury to not have to use the f— cloud, and sell your private life out AND pay for it via the API fee (0.5¢/~700 words) is the cherry on the cake. Works with all sorts of file formats, you drag it, drop it, and that's about it; you get a transcript.

by Olixver

Aiko is phenomenal and life-changing. I use it daily for work to transcribe interviews and for personal projects to seamlessly convert audio into text. The transcriptions are outstanding, and I appreciate how it organizes paragraphs. The variety of audio input and text output options is impressive. I can't imagine how I managed without Aiko! It's beautifully designed, highly effective, and deserves an A+ five star rating! Plus, don't forget there's a desktop version available too.

by A.Théo.0

I have sensitive documents I need transcribed, and this is the only app that doesn't Send anything to a third party server. Not only that, but the accuracy and the consistent updates are just too good.

I use it on a computer with no Internet access, it works all locally!

by Jds4life

This is an amazing app. My daughter is taking confirmation and must take sermon notes. I use Aiko to automatically transcribe the sermon so she can reference it later for help on her notes. It isn’t perfect but it is amazingly good. The fact that it is easy and free to use is a blessing. Thank you app developers!

by Homuraisme

omg I used this for a school assignment and althought it takes so long for Aiko to run, dont underestimate transcribing! I did one on my own and it took me so long. Aiko was amazing, you could easily just let it run in the background while doing other things. Amazing application!!

by Sag23~

I've used it to translate Voice Memos from my iPhone into text. Ust drop the file into the open window and it quckly does an amazing job.

As an older user, I am very happy to have found something that *just works,* doesn't spam me, or try and take over my Mac.

by QTxPI

Aiko has reminded me that there is good in the world. It does exactly what I needed without any nonsense. It is completely free and does the transcription on-device quickly and accurately. It transcribed a 56 minute Voice Memo in 14 minutes with a 16gb M2 Mac mini. I'm very very happy that I won't be missing anything from lectures anymore.

by ZeroOneSeven

this app is amazing and I am so grateful it is free to use. It saves me a lot of time with work and school so I can easily transcribe whatever I need. It’s an extremely convenient app to have and use, and saved me a few times when MS Word transcription decided not to work after taking an hour to upload a recording. If I could rate higher than 5 stars I would!!!

by Jellica17

This is what I’ve been looking for. It took me weeks to sort through all the stupid transcription apps to find this one. Highly recommend. It can both transcribe live or a audio file. Thank you!

by Anneepooh

Aiko transcribe nearly accurately for my voice memos. I haven’t tried to use other app because ida either complicated or I have to pay for it. Thank you so much! R

by SophiaFlotW

The very first time I used it it worked seamlessly! I uploaded a 20 minute interview and it captured everything in minutes. I will try it with a much longer recording and see if it's still as great.

by Wqlk4jnt

It is extremly accurate even with bad recordings.

Things to be awear of is it takes a ton of power and time to run. It seperates sentences as paragraphs so you will have to eddit into a cohesive text file once your done but it is amazing overall.

by LAX826

I've experienced heavy email fatigue recently and have honestly been sick of typing email after email. With this app, I can transcribe my emails, do a quick edit, and send them off. So far, so good!!

by Outcoldman

Not sure why I would need to use it, but maybe I will. Definetly pushing your mac on the next level :D

I tried to load an ATP podcast episode, and there are some feedback (hope the whisper API allows that):

1. Identify voices. If this is a podcast, you want to know who is talking. I mean just differenciate one person from another. Would be great also just to name the voices as well.

2. Ability to play the sentance from the audio, so if the text looks weird, you can actually listen what have been said.

3. Show timestamps on the UI.

by Crankph

also amazing, terrific, wonderful! I got this when I first saw it and thought this would be great for transcibing my wife's interviews. The first transcriots was iffy. But the 2nd was spot on. and the next and the next.
Yes, this is a terrific service app. Saves her hours of sitting and transcribing, and she's an excellent typist.
Thanks for Aiko. It is a WOW!

by Reviewer # 18

Using Aiko saved hours of work this week. It’s incredibly accurate - more than anything I’ve seen given how easy it is use.

Thank you for making this. I would very much like Aiko to continue to exist. Is there a way to support its existence?

by Wasaab

Aiko is amazing and works really well, I converted some audio from a video to text, it did a great job with spelling, punctuaction and text acuracy. Simply amazing app and wonderful job by the devloper. Thank you for keeping Aiko free and also off the cloud. Nice to have some alternatives to whats out there.

by Schmendrick12

Basic, simple, free--and exactly what I need! Aiko does not have a lot of bells and whistles, but it's perfect for just needing to get transcription from any audio or video file. I'm very thankful for Aiko!

by LifeIsButADream

Works great. Just follow directions and don’t leave the page till it’s complete. From there you can share it in many different formats. Highly recommended.

by Pross57japan

Aiko is huge, and uses a lot of RAM to run, but it seems to do a pretty good job (although it doesn't add much punctuation), and it's free. It also works completely offline, which is great if you're dealing with confidential materials.

by 那那多吉

and I just hope the large model can be available

by Mikich

Long time was looking for simple voice recording to text functionality.
The fact is that the OpenAI is by far the best model for voice recognition. 99.9% works for me. Hope app developers will leave the simplicity and clean UI for next versions and will not overcomplicate Aiko .

by JuliusAM

It does what it says in the description so well it's a proven miracle tool for my coworkers and I. My only suggestion is to add certain features, for example:

- A queue so I don't have to keep manually adding new files to process
- A notification system to let me know when the file is done.

Other than that it's honestly perfect. Thank you so much!!!!!

by CamPursel

Excellent transcription tool, I would pay money for access to it

by Keithrub

Simple and effective. Can covert to srt with one click. Almost near perfect transcription - Only things missed were excessive cross-talk, obscure slang, and people's names.

by Dzika23

Aiko gets five stars because it does a better job than many paid apps. Thanks to the developer.

My wishlist:
- For CMD c to only copy highlighted text instead of the entire transcription
- Better performance (although it isn't bad)
- The ability to invoke Aiko directly from the share sheet

by ThomasMD

Simple and straight forward. It works. Also, check out his other apps! Very useful!

by SimpleReviewYes?

Sindre: amazing 👑 Thank you from the world!

by B02701231

Curious, will you charge Aiko in the future?