How do you turn a voice memo into text on a Mac?

Open the recording in the Voice Memos app, click the transcript, select the text, Control-click it and choose Copy. That works when your Mac has Apple silicon, runs macOS Sequoia, and sits in a country or region where Apple offers transcription. If one of those is missing, transcribe the audio file with a tool that runs on your own computer. Our guide to dictation in Mac apps covers typing by voice into documents, which is a different job from this one.

Open the recording in Voice Memos and copy the transcript

Voice Memos on a Mac can recognize and transcribe the speech in an audio recording ¹. The app writes the text from the recording, so you do not type anything. To get the text out, follow these steps:

1. Open the Voice Memos app on your Mac and click the recording.
2. Click to view the transcript.
3. Select the text you want, Control-click it, and choose Copy ².
4. Paste the text into a document, a Mail message or a text file.

This is transcription of a finished recording. Dictation means speaking so the words land in a document as you talk. A voice memo transcript arrives after the recording ends, which is why it reads as a draft to check, not as text you dictated.

Transcription needs macOS Sequoia and a Mac with Apple silicon

The requirement is the first thing to check. The macOS Sequoia version of Apple's page says that with macOS Sequoia and a Mac with Apple silicon, speech in your audio recordings can be recognized and transcribed to text in Voice Memos ³. The version of the page we read for newer macOS releases has the same transcription paragraph without that requirement, so Apple's wording differs by version. Check the version of macOS on your Mac before you rely on the steps above.

The three situations below cover most cases:

An Intel Mac is the case the requirement leaves out. Apple does not describe what an Intel Mac shows instead, so do not assume a transcript will appear.

Older recordings may already have a transcript when you open them

Apple says that when you open a recording made in macOS 14 or earlier, or on a device that does not support transcription, Voice Memos transcribes it automatically if it includes recorded speech ⁴. So an older memo you have never opened may already have text. Open it and look before you transcribe it again. Apple does not say how long the automatic transcription takes, so wait for the text to appear before you decide it failed.

Region limits are set by Apple, and the list is not published

Apple says audio transcription in Voice Memos on a Mac is not available in all countries or regions ⁵. Apple does not list the excluded countries on that page, so the only reliable check is whether a transcript appears for a recording made in your region. If it does not, the file route below is the practical option.

The transcript is a draft, so check names and numbers against the audio

Accuracy varies by engine. In a 2025 9to5Mac test of one 7-minute-31-second episode, Apple's speech API had a word error rate of 10.3 percent ⁶. The same audio gave Whisper Large V3 Turbo a word error rate of 1.5 percent ⁷. Word error rate counts the words an engine substitutes, drops or adds compared with a correct transcript, so 10.3 percent means about one word in ten differs.

The test ran Apple's speech API through an open-source project, not through the Voice Memos app, so it does not score Voice Memos. It does show that the same recording can produce very different error rates. Read the transcript against the audio before you send it on, and check names, numbers, dates and technical terms first, since those are the words an engine most often gets wrong.

Recordings that Voice Memos cannot transcribe need a file tool

If Voice Memos cannot transcribe a file, the route is a transcription tool that works on an audio file. Buzz describes itself as transcribing and translating audio offline on a personal computer ⁸, which keeps the recording on your own Mac. Web transcription tools are another option, such as our free audio-to-text page. Before you upload a private recording to any web tool, read its privacy terms, because an upload sends the file to a server that is not your Mac. For more routes, see our guide to voice memo transcription.

Apple's page does not say where Voice Memos transcription runs

Apple's page does not say whether Voice Memos transcription runs on your Mac or on Apple's servers. If that matters to you, test it. Turn on Airplane Mode, then transcribe a recording that has no transcript yet. A transcript that appears with no connection suggests the work did not need the internet. One test does not prove how the app handles every recording, so treat it as a check, not a promise. Our question on whether a voice recorder can be used for dictation covers how recordings differ from live dictation, and the question on whether Apple has a voice-to-text app lists the built-in options.