Transcribe recordings made in a monastery quiet talks, long silences.
Recordings made in a monastery, mostly dharma talks of about an hour and retreat sessions with long stretches of silence, come back as text at about 2 minutes per audio hour, so a 1-hour talk takes about 2 minutes. The first 20 minutes are free, and a 7-day retreat with two talks a day, 840 minutes in all, fits the $12 pack of 2,000.
What a meditation hall does to sound
The room is quiet, the teacher speaks softly, and half the recording is silence.
Soft voices and long pauses
Teachers often speak slowly and quietly, with pauses that run for minutes during guided meditation. The transcript simply resumes when speech does. A microphone close to the teacher matters more in this room than in almost any other.
Bells, chanting and the hall
Bells, gongs and the sounds of the hall are not transcribed. Chanting sits closer to music than to speech and may come back in part or not at all, so the talk itself is the part to rely on.
A talk, a retreat, an archive
One hour-long talk uses 60 minutes of a $6 pack of 500. A week-long retreat with two talks a day is 840 minutes, inside the $12 pack of 2,000. A community with years of recorded talks can use the $24 pack of 5,000 minutes, roughly 83 hours.
Teachings you can find again
The brief states the talk's theme and takeaways, and chapters mark where the teaching moved from one point to the next. The questions the talk answers are listed, and the chat finds the passage on working with restlessness, with its timestamp.
Why talk archives stay as audio
Years of talks, and no way to find the one about impermanence.
✗ A shelf of recordings
Many communities hold hundreds of hours of talks that can only be found by listening.
- Titles that give only the date
- Volunteers transcribing one talk a month
- Captions that give up on quiet speech
- Free tools that cut off before the talk ends
- No searchable record of what was taught
- Paying monthly for an archive project
✓ A searchable archive of talks
Each talk comes back as text with a brief and chapters, ready for a website, a book draft or a study group.
- About 2 minutes per hour-long talk
- The first 20 minutes free
- Silence and bells left out
- The teacher named in the summary and chapters
- The questions each talk answers, listed
- DOCX for editing into a book
Sample
An evening dharma talk.
This sample is illustrative and was written for this page, not taken from any teacher's recording. Timestamps show how a talk with long pauses reads.
Export
One transcript. Five clean formats.
Every pack exports all five — no format is held back for a higher tier.
Plain text
De-ummed paragraphs. Ready to paste.
SRT captions
Timed to the speech. Every video editor reads this.
WebVTT
HTML5 player + YouTube uploads.
Show notes
Formatted with chapters and pull-quotes.
Machine-readable
Timestamped text for your own tools.
Pricing
Honest pricing, no surprises.
A pack from $6 (500 minutes) opens the full transcript. After that, no subscription and no auto-renew — every tier is a one-time minute pack, and credits never expire. Buy once, use the minutes whenever you need them.
Casual pack
$6/500 min
8 hours of audio — $0.72 an hour. One-time — credits never expire.
- 500 minutes of audio
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
- Executive summary & key quote
Best value
$12/2,000 min
33 hours of audio — $0.36 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 2,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- All export formats
- Unlimited AI chat per transcript
Bulk pack
$24/5,000 min
83 hours of audio — $0.29 an hour. Credits never expire.
- 5,000 minutes of audio
- Priority queue
- API access for batch pipelines
- All export formats
FAQ
Monastery recordings, the questions.
How long until a dharma talk is ready as text?
About 2 minutes for an hour of audio. A 45-minute talk is usually ready in under 2 minutes, and a 6-hour day of retreat sessions in around 12.
What does a week of retreat talks cost?
Fourteen hour-long talks make 840 minutes, which fits the $12 pack of 2,000. A single talk is covered by the first 20 minutes free plus a $6 pack of 500 minutes for the remainder.
The teacher speaks very quietly. Will it work?
Usually, if the recorder sat near the teacher. Soft speech close to a microphone transcribes well, while soft speech picked up across a large hall by a phone is where words drop out. Read the first 20 minutes before you buy anything.
The whole retreat is one recorder file. Will it go through as one upload?
The limit is one file of 10 hours or 5 GB. A file longer than 10 hours is sent as two. Before a pack, anything up to 2 GB uploads right away; above that, it starts once a pack is on the account.
Can it handle talks given in another language?
Yes. 99 languages are detected automatically, Japanese and Korean among them. Terms from Pali or Sanskrit come back as the model hears them, so a quick review pass against the teacher's own spelling is worthwhile.
Which formats are there, and who can hear the talk?
Downloads come as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training, and a talk and its transcript can be deleted at any time.
Related
More for talks and retreats
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