Transcribe a dharma talk and the retreat around it.
You have a dharma talk recorded at the sangha or on retreat, often an hour or more with long pauses, and you want it as text. Upload the file or paste the link: an hour-long talk takes about 2 minutes, the first 20 minutes are free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) covers the remainder.
For talks that take their time
A talk paced for listening, turned into something to read slowly.
Silence is part of it
Talks often include guided pauses and stretches of quiet. The transcript carries the spoken words with their timestamps, and the quiet minutes simply sit between them, so a pause does not end the transcript early.
A retreat, talk by talk
A week of retreat usually means a morning instruction and an evening talk each day. Upload them together, or paste a Drive folder, and each one comes back as its own transcript in the same Library.
The thread of a talk
The brief sets out the central teaching point and the takeaways, and the chapters follow the talk as it moves from story to instruction to questions. It is useful for a teacher preparing next season or a student returning to a single passage.
Recordings held carefully
Talks given in a small room can include personal questions from participants. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training; delete any one of them when you are done.
Where talks go
An archive of talks that nobody can search.
✗ Audio archive
Years of talks collect on a hard drive or a podcast feed, and finding one teaching means remembering which week it was.
- Hours of talks with only a date for a title
- Transcription tools that time out on long silence
- Volunteers transcribing by ear for weeks
- No text for students who prefer to read
- Retreat recordings that never get processed
- Talks cut short to fit a free tier
✓ Readable archive
Each talk gets its own transcript, brief and chapters, and the whole set becomes searchable.
- A full talk in one file, pauses included
- Every retreat talk as its own document
- Search a word across all of them
- A short brief on top of each talk
- DOCX for editing into a booklet
- Ready in minutes, not weeks
Sample output
An evening talk, with its quiet spaces in place.
Illustrative output, not a real talk. The jump in timestamps between lines is where the recording was quiet for a guided pause.
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
Dharma talks, answered.
How long does a dharma talk take to transcribe?
An hour-long talk is usually ready in about 2 minutes, and a 90-minute talk in about three. Long pauses in the recording do not slow it down.
What does a retreat's worth of talks cost?
A single talk under 20 minutes is free in full; a longer one is previewed and a $6 pack (500 minutes) does the rest. A 7-day retreat with two one-hour talks a day is 14 hours, or 840 minutes, which fits one $12 pack (2,000 minutes).
Is there a limit on file size?
A talk file can run to 10 hours and 5 GB. A first upload, made before any pack is bought, can be up to 2 GB, and anything bigger begins as soon as a pack is on the account.
The recorder ran all day. Do I have to split it into talks?
Not if it is under 10 hours; upload it as one file and the chapters mark where each talk begins. A recorder left on for longer than 10 hours needs to go up as two files.
Talks include Pali or Sanskrit terms, or are given in another language. Does that work?
Talks are transcribed in their main language, detected automatically from 99 including Hindi, Korean, Spanish and Tagalog. Pali or Sanskrit terms inside an English talk are written as they sound, so check them against your own spelling before publishing.
What formats can I export?
Every talk exports as TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON. DOCX suits a booklet or newsletter, and SRT or VTT add captions to a video of the talk. The text belongs to you to edit and share.
Related
More for talks and teachings.
Bring the talk. Or the whole retreat.
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