M4A is what your phone saves when you tap record. Share the memo off the device, drop it in below, and the words come back as a genuine .docx that Word, Google Docs and Pages all open. Your first memo is free to read in full, up to 3 hours long · then $8 buys 1,000 minutes that never lapse.
How it works
Three steps, and the middle one catches the mistakes.
Share it to a cloud drive, AirDrop it to a laptop, or mail it to yourself. What lands is an .m4a and it uploads as it is.
Open the transcript and click a timestamp to hear that line back. Names are worth a look; a correction you save stays saved.
Export to Word, times in or times out. TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON and Markdown are there too, at no further cost.
About M4A
Small, convenient, recorded somewhere noisier than a studio.
Voice Memos on an iPhone, QuickTime on a Mac and most Android recorder apps write M4A: AAC audio in an MP4 container, under another extension.
A memo at the standard Compressed quality is roughly 30 MB an hour. Switch to Lossless and the same hour becomes several hundred megabytes.
Phones pick up handling noise and table knocks far more than a dedicated mic. Resting one on something soft improves a transcript more than any setting.
An all-day memo sits inside the limits at compressed quality, so ten hours is what you meet first. The transcript view marks the speakers; the Word file is text.
| M4A source | One hour | Three hours | Ten hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voice Memos, Compressed | ~30 MB | ~90 MB | ~300 MB |
| Voice Memos, Lossless | ~350 MB | ~1 GB | ~3.5 GB |
| 128 kbps AAC, podcast style | ~58 MB | ~173 MB | ~576 MB |
Approximate. Above 500 MB the upload page takes over, and the per-file ceiling stays at ten hours or 5 GB.
Who records this way
The recording was quick. Writing it up is the part worth skipping.
Record from the front row, read it back that evening, turn what you needed into notes.
Journalists record on the phone because it is already out. Quotes get chosen in the Word file.
Dictate what you saw on the walk back, then edit the memo into a report.
A three-minute memo at midnight is a paragraph you need not reconstruct by morning.
Pricing
Most memos fit inside the free first transcript, readable in full at any length. Beyond that: $8 for 1,000 minutes, $12 for 2,000, $24 for 5,000, and credit never expires.
A 22-minute seminar memo is about $0.18 on the $8 pack. A term of two lectures a week, say 40 hours, is 2,400 minutes: inside the $24 pack. Pricing spells it out.
FAQ
Share the memo out of the app, drop the .m4a into the box on this page, then export DOCX once the transcript appears.
No. Upload the file the phone produced; M4A is AAC audio in an MP4 container and is read directly.
No. Speaker labels are shown in the transcript view here on the page. The Word download holds the spoken text, and JSON is the export that includes speaker information.
Ten hours or 5 GB per file. At compressed quality the size ceiling is nowhere near, so length is the only practical limit.
Usually, though a cafe or a car is harder than a room. Speech close to the phone is clear; a distant voice over background noise is where mistakes creep in.
Yes, a standard .docx and not renamed rich text, so it opens and edits in Word, Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice.
Yes. While signed in you can change or remove a line and save it before exporting. The Word file stays editable once downloaded.
Yes. Transcripts stay in your library, so you can return for another format without spending more credit.
Instant preview, no signup, and the first one is $0.99 at any length.