A recorded talk, a course video, a screen recording with narration — if it has spoken audio, you can transcribe the video to text on your Mac and get subtitles out of it at the same time, without sending the file to a cloud service first. Here's how it works with igooor.
What you need
An Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 26 Tahoe or later, and igooor installed. Like every other part of igooor, this runs on-device after the initial one-time setup download — no internet connection required to actually process your file.
Step 1: Hand igooor the video file
You don't need to extract the audio track yourself first. Drop the video file into igooor from the menu bar the same way you would an audio file, and it takes care of the rest — reading the spoken audio out of the video and transcribing it.
Step 2: Transcription happens on your Mac
The video (and the audio inside it) never leaves your device. That matters more for video than you might expect — recorded meetings, internal training videos, and unpublished course footage are exactly the kind of content people don't want sitting on a third-party server, even briefly. igooor also auto-detects the spoken language, so multilingual footage isn't a problem.
Step 3: Get a transcript — and an SRT subtitle file
You get the plain text transcript, saved locally and searchable in your history. If you need the video itself to carry captions — for accessibility, for a platform that requires them, or just because viewers watch on mute — igooor can output a properly timed SRT subtitle file from the same pass, ready to attach to the video. If subtitles are really the main thing you're after, see the dedicated guide on generating subtitles and captions on Mac.
Why not just use a browser-based tool?
Most free video-to-text tools online mean uploading your file to someone else's server and waiting in a queue — and many cap file size or length unless you pay. Doing it entirely on your Mac means no upload wait, no size limit imposed by a web form, and no copy of your video sitting anywhere but your own drive. You can try the full thing free for 14 days, no card required.
Only need audio, no picture?
If your source is a plain recording rather than a video, the process is identical — see transcribing audio to text on Mac.