Aiko

Name: Aiko
Price: 24 USD
Rating: 4.8 (170 reviews)
Author: Sindre Sorhus

AI Speech-to-Text (Transcribe)

$24.00

170 Ratings
Ages

4+
Years
Category

Productivity
Developer

Sindre Sorhus
Language

EN
English
Size

3.1
GB

High-quality on-device transcription. Easily convert speech to text from meetings, lectures, and more. The transcription is powered by OpenAI's Whisper running locally on your device. Nothing leaves your device. You can export the transcription as subtitles too. It has a word-replacement feature to let you automatically fix common mistakes. Aiko favors accuracy over speed. It does not do live transcription while recording. It does not currently have speaker detection. Try the trial first. See website. The app requires an Apple silicon Mac with at least 16 GB of RAM. It does not work well on Intel Macs. Supports audio in 100 different languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Māori, Nepali, Norwegian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, Yoruba The app was made possible thanks to Whisper by OpenAI and whisper.cpp by Georgi Gerganov. ■ FAQ ‣ Can I edit the text in the app? I don't plan to support any editing. Export the transcription and edit it in a proper text editor. ‣ Why is the app so large? The app delivers the highest quality transcription on the market for 100 different languages. Rather than asking why it's so large, the real question is how is it so small. ‣ Why is the transcription so slow? The app favors accuracy over speed. However, performance is expected to improve in the coming months. ‣ Can I delete some of the languages to save space? This is unfortunately not possible. The model has all the languages stored together in a way that makes it impossible to remove just some languages. More FAQs on the website. ■ Technical details The app uses the Whisper large v2 model on macOS and the medium or small model on iOS depending on available memory. ■ Privacy The transcription is done locally on your device. Nothing leaves your device. The app is not even able to connect to the internet due to self-imposed restrictions that are enforced by macOS (no network entitlement). ■ Support You can contact me through the feedback button in the “Help” menu in the app.

Ratings & Reviews

4.8

out of 5

170 Ratings

Way Better Than Apple’s Transcriptions
11/14/2024

TP in DC
I’ve been using Aiko on Apple Voice Memo Recordings of technical conference sessions, webinars, and training sessions. Initially on an iPhone X, and now on an iPhone 16. Aiko’s transcriptions are way more accurate than Apple’s transcriptions. Aiko takes more time to transcribe but produces a more comprehensible product with less scrubbing required. In fact I find Apple’s output to be mostly incomprehensible. Aiko works through accents and ambient and competing noise. It does its best to decipher names and comes close in difficult cases and keeps errors consistent so you can find and replace easily. It does OK with technical jargon as well - within reason. Whereas Apple’s transcriptions totally lose it and produce gobbledygook. This app is highly recommended as a very helpful productivity tool.
Way Better Than Apple’s Transcriptions
11/14/2024

TP in DC

I’ve been using Aiko on Apple Voice Memo Recordings of technical conference sessions, webinars, and training sessions. Initially on an iPhone X, and now on an iPhone 16. Aiko’s transcriptions are way more accurate than Apple’s transcriptions. Aiko takes more time to transcribe but produces a more comprehensible product with less scrubbing required. In fact I find Apple’s output to be mostly incomprehensible. Aiko works through accents and ambient and competing noise. It does its best to decipher names and comes close in difficult cases and keeps errors consistent so you can find and replace easily. It does OK with technical jargon as well - within reason. Whereas Apple’s transcriptions totally lose it and produce gobbledygook. This app is highly recommended as a very helpful productivity tool.
Excellent tool for transcribing dictation recorder
08/20/2025

jld
I use this primarily with an Olympus DM-720 dictation recorder. So far it has worked perfectly and pretty fast (MacBook Pro M4 Max). I use the recorder when walking/hiking with my dog, so at times there is background noise, and it hasn’t had a problem. (the recorder is designed to do this which also helps). I am disappointed it does not have an AppleScript dictionary although it does have an Actions palette. I’m a long time coder in many languages and have used AppleScript for many tasks including a full interface with Apple Mail using Clojure and PostgreSQL as the backend. It can be done by calling shortcuts from AppleScript but that’s a kludge.
Excellent tool for transcribing dictation recorder
08/20/2025

jld

I use this primarily with an Olympus DM-720 dictation recorder. So far it has worked perfectly and pretty fast (MacBook Pro M4 Max). I use the recorder when walking/hiking with my dog, so at times there is background noise, and it hasn’t had a problem. (the recorder is designed to do this which also helps). I am disappointed it does not have an AppleScript dictionary although it does have an Actions palette. I’m a long time coder in many languages and have used AppleScript for many tasks including a full interface with Apple Mail using Clojure and PostgreSQL as the backend. It can be done by calling shortcuts from AppleScript but that’s a kludge.
Extraordinarily accurate
06/09/2024

Somagiri
I have been using it to transcribe some notes that are in English with Sanskrit words. After many pages, I have so far only found one mistake, and, surprisingly, none were in the Sanskrit. This is really well done. My only gripe is that the transcription leaves two lines between each sentence, which means I take it over to ChatGPT and have the extra lines replaced with spaces as I really don't want 3 times as many pages. There are hundreds of pages to transcribe, which is enough already. I wish they would make a setting for spacing between sentences.
Extraordinarily accurate
06/09/2024

Somagiri

I have been using it to transcribe some notes that are in English with Sanskrit words. After many pages, I have so far only found one mistake, and, surprisingly, none were in the Sanskrit. This is really well done. My only gripe is that the transcription leaves two lines between each sentence, which means I take it over to ChatGPT and have the extra lines replaced with spaces as I really don't want 3 times as many pages. There are hundreds of pages to transcribe, which is enough already. I wish they would make a setting for spacing between sentences.
Stunning Accuracy
06/19/2024

eskinner42
I've tried and rejected speech-to-text products for years, Apple's built-in and commercial ($) packages included.Trying "yet another" product, I was absolutely stunned with Aiko's accuracy! It didn't miss a word in what I considered a challenging dictation, intuitively added periods--from my tone of delivery? Or longer pauses? I don't know--and put commas where I felt they should be, and omitted them where I didn't.I'm a novelist and hate editing, and when Aiko gave me a near-perfect transcription, I was "sold" on this free product.Well done!
Stunning Accuracy
06/19/2024

eskinner42

I've tried and rejected speech-to-text products for years, Apple's built-in and commercial ($) packages included.Trying "yet another" product, I was absolutely stunned with Aiko's accuracy! It didn't miss a word in what I considered a challenging dictation, intuitively added periods--from my tone of delivery? Or longer pauses? I don't know--and put commas where I felt they should be, and omitted them where I didn't.I'm a novelist and hate editing, and when Aiko gave me a near-perfect transcription, I was "sold" on this free product.Well done!