Free transcription usually comes with a monthly minute limit, because the tool is paying a cloud service to process your audio. Their cost goes up with every minute you record, so the free tier has to stop somewhere.
There is a way around it. If the transcription runs on your own computer instead of in someone's cloud, it costs the tool nothing, so there is no reason to cap it. That is why Jotted's transcript is free forever with no minute limit, on unlimited recordings of any length.
Speech-to-text in the cloud costs money per hour of audio. A tool offering it free is paying that bill for you, so the free plan is a marketing cost with a ceiling. Eight hundred minutes a month, or three hundred, or however much they can absorb.
There is often a second limit people miss: how long transcripts are kept. Some free tiers store them for a few months and then remove them, so the archive you were relying on quietly empties.
Speech-to-text models now run well on ordinary laptops. Jotted uses Whisper, running on your own machine, which changes the economics completely. There is no per-hour cost to anyone, so there is nothing to ration.
Three things follow from that.
The trade is that it uses your computer's processing power for a few minutes after the call, and a larger, more accurate model takes longer than a smaller one. You can choose which model to use in Settings.
Every word, with timestamps, searchable and exportable. Speakers are labeled by channel: your microphone track is you, and everything coming through the system audio is everyone else. On a two-person call that is genuinely all you need.
What it does not do on the free plan is tell the other participants apart from each other by name. Working out that this voice is Dana and that one is Marco needs a different kind of processing that does cost money per hour, so it sits on the paid plan along with the summary and the action items.
Yes, if the transcription runs on your own computer rather than in the cloud. Jotted transcribes locally, so the free plan has unlimited recordings of unlimited length with no monthly cap.
Because cloud speech-to-text costs the provider money per hour of audio. The free tier is a cost they absorb, so it has to have a ceiling.
It depends on the model you run. Jotted lets you choose: a faster small model, or a larger, slower and more accurate one, which helps with accents and mixed-language speech.
Not on the free plan. Transcription happens on your own machine, so nothing is sent anywhere. On the paid plan the recording is backed up to the cloud, which is a separate choice.
Yes. Copy it, or export a whole recording as a folder with a readable file and a machine-readable one. Export is not restricted to paid plans, because it is your data.
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