Every option in the catalog for when you need to turn audio into accurate text, often offline — 15 speech and transcription engines, 15 of them free or freemium, with the pricing tier printed on every row.
Flocci AI Tools lists 15 of them, ordered free tiers first: NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B, NVIDIA Parakeet, sherpa-onnx, faster-whisper and FunASR. Every one of them is free or has a free tier. Each entry states what it uniquely does rather than a score.
9 on this page are marked fully free with no paid plan at all: NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B, NVIDIA Parakeet, sherpa-onnx, faster-whisper and FunASR. The remaining 6 are freemium, trial or paid, and each is labelled with its exact tier so nothing surprises you at sign-up.
Free tools first, then freemium, then trial, then paid, and alphabetically inside each tier. Nobody pays to appear higher: Flocci AI Tools carries no ads, no sponsored slots and no paid listings, so the order reflects price and nothing else.
NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B, NVIDIA Parakeet, sherpa-onnx, AssemblyAI and Deepgram all work in a browser tab with no install needed — just open the site and go. 9 of the 15 free speech and transcription engines listed here are browser-based.
sherpa-onnx, Moonshine, whisper.cpp and Mistral Voxtral have an iOS or Android app. 4 of the 15 free speech and transcription engines here can run on your phone.
faster-whisper, FunASR, OpenAI Whisper and WhisperX can be self-hosted or run locally without a browser — useful for privacy, air-gapped networks, or avoiding API rate limits. 4 of the 15 free speech and transcription engines here run offline.
| Tool | Pricing | Type | Listed for |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Speech-recognition plus LLM hybrid model that transcribes and can summarize or answer questions about audio |
| NVIDIA Parakeet | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params |
| sherpa-onnx | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech, VAD and speaker diarization without internet |
| faster-whisper | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Whisper reimplementation on CTranslate2, up to 4x faster with less memory |
| FunASR | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Open-source speech recognition toolkit with Paraformer and SenseVoice models |
| Moonshine | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Small streaming speech-recognition models for phones, browsers and low-power devices |
| OpenAI Whisper | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free |
| whisper.cpp | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | C/C++ port of OpenAI Whisper running on CPU, Metal, Core ML, CUDA and Vulkan |
| WhisperX | Free | Speech & Transcription Engines | 70x real-time transcription speed via batched inference on top of Whisper |
| AssemblyAI | Freemium | Speech & Transcription Engines | Speech-to-text with audio intelligence |
| Deepgram | Freemium | Speech & Transcription Engines | Fast, accurate speech-to-text API |
| ElevenLabs Scribe | Freemium | Speech & Transcription Engines | Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency |
| Mistral Voxtral | Freemium | Speech & Transcription Engines | Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face |
| Soniox | Freemium | Speech & Transcription Engines | Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates |
| Speechmatics | Freemium | Speech & Transcription Engines | Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support |