If you've got a voice memo, an interview recording, or a podcast episode sitting on your Mac and you need it as text, you don't have to upload it anywhere. You can transcribe audio to text entirely on your Mac, with no cloud round-trip and no file size limit imposed by a web upload form. Here's exactly how, using igooor.
What you need
An Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe or later, and igooor installed — it's a direct download (signed and notarized by Apple, not on the Mac App Store, since it needs system-level access to work the way it does). The first run downloads the on-device model it needs; after that, everything happens locally, with no internet connection required.
Step 1: Open igooor and drop in your file
igooor lives in your menu bar. Click it, and you can hand it an audio file directly — a voice memo, a call recording, a music-app export, whatever format your recorder produced. It doesn't matter whether the file is two minutes or two hours long; there's no per-minute cloud billing to think about.
Step 2: It transcribes — on your device, not in the cloud
This is the part that's actually different from most transcription tools: the audio never leaves your Mac. There's no server upload, no third party holding a copy of your recording, and no account required. igooor also auto-detects the spoken language, so you don't need to tell it what you're feeding it.
Step 3: Get your transcript — and a subtitle file if you want one
You get the full text back, saved to your local history so it's searchable and copyable later. If you need timed captions rather than a plain transcript, igooor can also output an SRT subtitle file from the same audio — handy if the recording is going to end up as a video somewhere. If you only need a quick transcript for typing or dictation as you go, that's the same engine that powers igooor's regular voice typing.
Why transcribe on-device instead of using a cloud tool
Interviews, meeting recordings, and voice memos are often exactly the kind of audio you don't want sitting on someone else's server — client conversations, personal notes, unreleased work. Doing the transcription entirely on your Mac means there's nothing to leak, nothing to delete later, and no subscription you're locked into just to get your own words back as text. You get 14 days free to try it, no card required, and after that a monthly or one-time lifetime plan — chosen inside the app, not upsold on a pricing page.
Got a video instead of an audio file?
The same on-device engine handles that too — see how to transcribe video to text on Mac if your source file has picture as well as sound.