# The best free speech and transcription engines 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. ## Stats - 15 tools listed - 15 free or freemium - 9 with no paid plan at all - 1 sub-categories covered ## FAQ ### What are the best free speech and transcription engines? 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. ### Which of these are completely free? 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. ### How is this list ordered? 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. ## Quick picks ### Which speech and transcription engines work in a browser with no install? 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. ### Which speech and transcription engines have a mobile app? 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. ### Which speech and transcription engines can you self-host or run offline? 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. ## Tools - [NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/nvidia-canary-qwen-2-5b) — Free — Speech-recognition plus LLM hybrid model that transcribes and can summarize or answer questions about audio - [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/nvidia-parakeet) — Free — Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params - [sherpa-onnx](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/sherpa-onnx) — Free — Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech, VAD and speaker diarization without internet - [faster-whisper](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/faster-whisper) — Free — Whisper reimplementation on CTranslate2, up to 4x faster with less memory - [FunASR](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/funasr) — Free — Open-source speech recognition toolkit with Paraformer and SenseVoice models - [Moonshine](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/moonshine) — Free — Small streaming speech-recognition models for phones, browsers and low-power devices - [OpenAI Whisper](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/openai-whisper) — Free — Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free - [whisper.cpp](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/whisper-cpp) — Free — C/C++ port of OpenAI Whisper running on CPU, Metal, Core ML, CUDA and Vulkan - [WhisperX](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/whisperx) — Free — 70x real-time transcription speed via batched inference on top of Whisper - [AssemblyAI](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/assemblyai) — Freemium — Speech-to-text with audio intelligence - [Deepgram](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/deepgram) — Freemium — Fast, accurate speech-to-text API - [ElevenLabs Scribe](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/elevenlabs-scribe) — Freemium — Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency - [Mistral Voxtral](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/mistral-voxtral) — Freemium — Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face - [Soniox](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/soniox) — Freemium — Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates - [Speechmatics](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/speechmatics) — Freemium — Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support --- Source: Flocci AI Tools — https://aitools.flocci.in/best/best-speech-transcription-engines Facts last verified: October 2026