How do you transcribe voice memos on a Mac?

What Voice Memos gives you

Voice Memos is a good recorder and an awkward transcriber. Recent versions on the Mac and iPhone can show a live transcription of a memo, which is handy in the moment, but it is tied to the app and not always the clean, exportable text file you want. On older systems the transcription is not there at all.

So if your goal is a proper transcript, of an existing memo or on a system that does not transcribe, the reliable route is to get the recording out of Voice Memos and into a transcription tool.

Getting the memo onto your Mac

You have two easy ways to do this. Voice Memos syncs across your devices through iCloud, so a memo recorded on your iPhone shows up in the Mac app on its own, nothing to transfer. Or you can share any memo directly, which exports it as an m4a file you can save wherever you like.

Either way you end up with an audio file on your Mac, which is all a transcription tool needs.

Transcribing it privately

Voice memos are often personal, so this is a case where keeping the audio on your machine is worth doing. An on-device tool transcribes the m4a on your Mac without uploading it, which suits reminders to yourself, ideas dictated on a walk, or notes you would rather not hand to a cloud service.

Import the file, let it process, and you get the text back as something you can paste into your notes.

Longer memos

Length is not a problem for on-device transcription, so a long memo transcribes just like a short one, it just takes a little longer. If the memo rambles, as memos do, an on-device summary can pull it down to the points worth keeping, so you are not re-reading ten minutes of thinking-out-loud to find the one idea you wanted.