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How to transcribe a lecture recording on a Mac for free, and turn it into study notes

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To transcribe a lecture recording on a Mac for free, record it with permission in Voice Memos or Notes, or take a recording you already have, then drop the file on the Transcribe a file card in YapToText and copy the plain text, transcribed on your Mac with nothing uploaded. From there, Note mode or the Bullet Points and Summarize actions turn the transcript into a first draft of study notes.

I built YapToText because my hands make typing difficult, and taking notes at lecture speed is the kind of typing I cannot do. It is free, with no account and no minute cap, and it needs an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later. This page is only about the lecture recording. The guide to dictation for students covers essays, study notes by voice and school rules on AI tools.

Download YapToText on the Mac App StoreDownload for free. No account, nothing locked, macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Source on GitHub.

On this page: 11 sections
  1. Steps
  2. Ask before you record a lecture
  3. Record the lecture with Voice Memos or Notes
    1. Step 1: Record on your iPhone or your Mac
    2. Step 2: Look for Apple's transcript
  4. Teach it the course words first
  5. Transcribe the lecture
    1. Step 1: Pick Raw Transcription
    2. Step 2: Drop the recording
    3. Step 3: Save the raw transcript
  6. Turn the transcript into study notes
    1. Step 1: Send a section down
    2. Step 2: Pick Note and press Transform
  7. Pick the right tool for each lecture
  8. If the transcript comes back wrong
  9. What it cannot do
  10. The short version
  11. Questions

Steps

  1. Ask the lecturer for permission and check your school's rules on recording.
  2. Record the lecture in Voice Memos on your iPhone or with Record Audio in Notes on your Mac.
  3. Add the course's names and terms to a dictionary on YapToText's Dictionaries page.
  4. On the Utility page, pick Raw Transcription in the Transcribe a file card and drop the recording on it.
  5. Click Copy and save the raw transcript in a document.
  6. Send a section to the Transform text card, pick Note and press Transform, then check the notes against the transcript.

Ask before you record a lecture

A lecture belongs to the person giving it, and a recording can catch classmates asking questions too. Get permission first, then make the recording, then transcribe it.

  • Ask the lecturer. Ask before the lecture, not after, and take no for an answer.
  • Follow your school's rules. Schools, departments and courses can each have rules on recording lectures and on sharing recordings. I cannot tell you what yours say, and I am not a lawyer, so read them.
  • Keep it to yourself. A recording made for your own study is a different thing from one you post or pass around. Check what the rules say about sharing before you send it to anyone.
  • Ask about support. If you need recordings or transcripts because of a disability, your school's disability or accessibility office is the place to ask how that works where you study.
  • Check the AI rules too. Raw Transcription uses no AI cleanup. Note mode and the AI actions use AI on your Mac. The students guide has a section on checking your school's rules on AI and matching a mode to them.

Record the lecture with Voice Memos or Notes

YapToText transcribes a file, so the recording comes from somewhere else. Apple's own apps are the free way to make it, and on a Mac that qualifies they make a transcript too. Record with an Apple app, then decide whether its transcript is enough.

Step 1: Record on your iPhone or your Mac

  • You: On an iPhone, record in Voice Memos. On a Mac with macOS Tahoe 26 or later, open a note, click the Attachment button in the toolbar, then Record Audio, then the Record button; on macOS Sequoia 15, click the Record Audio button in the toolbar instead.
  • macOS: Records. Apple says that with iCloud, a Voice Memos recording from your iPhone appears in Voice Memos on your Mac too, when both share an Apple Account and Voice Memos is on in iCloud settings.
  • Check: In Notes, click the Pause button, then Done, when the lecture ends. The recording sits in the note.

Step 2: Look for Apple's transcript

  • You: In Voice Memos, click the recording, then the Transcription button. In Notes, double-click the recording to open its details.
  • macOS: Shows a transcript, if your Mac qualifies. Apple lists macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon for Voice Memos, and a Mac with M1 or later and a supported device language, such as English or Spanish, for Notes. Neither is available in every country or region.
  • Check: If a transcript is there, you may not need anything else. In Notes, click the More button and choose Copy Transcript to keep the words, because deleting a recording deletes its transcript too.

YapToText earns its place when the Mac does not qualify, when the recording came from somewhere else, when your Mac's language or the lecture's language is not one Apple supports, or when you want the course's terms spelled right and the text shaped into notes. To hand it a Voice Memos recording, drag the recording from Voice Memos to a Finder window, which saves it as a file. The guides to transcribing Voice Memos and recording audio in Notes go step by step.

  • Sit close. A phone near the lecturer beats a laptop at the back of the room, and your own typing is noise the model has to hear past.
  • Test ten seconds. Record a few words before the lecture starts and play them back.
  • Do not dictate the lecture live. By default, YapToText lets go of your microphone about a second after each dictation, and one live dictation stops itself after 30 minutes. Record a file and transcribe that.
  • A recording from your course. If your course posts lecture videos and you are allowed to download them, an MP4 or MOV works as it is. The guide to turning a video into text covers video files.

Teach it the course words first

Lectures are full of words a speech model rarely hears: the lecturer's name, the theorists on the reading list, and the terms the whole course is about. Add the course's terms before you drop the file, and they come out spelled right the first time.

On the Dictionaries page, each entry pairs what the app hears, in Heard, with the spelling you want, in Replace with. The Replace with side is also handed to Whisper as words to listen for, and your dictionaries apply to file transcription as well as dictation.

Dictionary entry: A term from a biochemistry lecture.

Heard: michaelis menton
Replace with: Michaelis-Menten

What happens: Every michaelis menton in the transcript is written Michaelis-Menten, and Michaelis-Menten is handed to Whisper as a word to listen for.

  • One dictionary per course. Press New Dictionary and name it after the course. Each dictionary has its own switch, so turn it off when the term ends instead of deleting it.
  • Start from the syllabus. The reading list and the slide headings are the words most likely to come up.
  • Keep only this course on. The words handed to Whisper fit in a budget of about 200 characters, with your dictionary terms first, so keep only the dictionaries you need switched on while you transcribe.
  • Fix it once. If a term still comes out wrong, put the spelling it actually wrote in Heard and run the file again, or press Generate variations on the entry. The Dictionaries guide covers the rest.
  • Set the language. For a lecture in another language, choose it in the Language picker on the AI Models page, or Auto-detect language. The language guide lists all 29.
YapToText's Dictionaries page: suggested fixes such as thursday to Thursday, and the General dictionary with iPhone and Wi-Fi.
Figure 1. A dictionary for each course: put the lecturer's name and the terms from the syllabus in it before you transcribe, and switch it off when the term ends.

Transcribe the lecture

The whole job happens in one card on YapToText's Utility page, Transcribe a file, with the same Whisper model that handles live dictation, on your Mac. YapToText is free on the Mac App Store. Pick Raw Transcription, drop the recording, and save the text before you do anything else.

Step 1: Pick Raw Transcription

  • You: Open the Utility page. In the Transcribe a file card's mode menu, pick Raw Transcription.
  • YapToText: Uses that mode for the file. Raw Transcription is literal speech to text with basic punctuation, and no AI rewrites the words.
  • Check: The menu says Raw Transcription.

Step 2: Drop the recording

  • You: Drag the audio or video file onto the card, or click Choose File and pick it.
  • YapToText: Reads the file by its content, not its extension, and transcribes it on your Mac. A long lecture is cut at quiet moments into pieces of about 2 minutes and handled one piece after another.
  • Check: The card says it is transcribing your file. A 90-minute lecture takes a while on your Mac's own chip, and there is no minute cap.

Step 3: Save the raw transcript

  • You: Click Copy and paste the text into a document for that week's lecture.
  • YapToText: Hands over plain text, with no speaker labels or timestamps.
  • Check: The lecture is saved outside the card. The Utility card does not save to History, so text you clear from it is gone.

If you want a copy kept for you, Transcribe file in the menu bar panel does the same job in your current mode and files the result in History under the file's name, where Export Text saves it as a .txt file. History deletes entries older than 30 days by default, so export the term's lectures as you go. The guide to transcribing an audio file on a Mac lists every format YapToText reads.

Turn the transcript into study notes

A raw lecture transcript is long, repetitive and full of the asides that make a lecture good to sit in and hard to revise from. YapToText can shape a copy into notes, on your Mac. Keep the raw transcript, and make notes from a copy.

Step 1: Send a section down

  • You: Click Send below on the Transcribe a file card, or paste one section of the saved transcript into the Transform text card.
  • YapToText: Puts the text in Transform text, ready to rewrite.
  • Check: The section you want is in the card.

Step 2: Pick Note and press Transform

  • You: Pick Note and press Transform.
  • YapToText: Rewrites it as short headings and bullets, with action items pulled into a list and nothing added that was not said.
  • Check: Read the notes against the transcript, especially numbers, dates and definitions. Then click Copy.

Below Transform text, the AI action on text card runs a saved AI Action on any text. Run Summarize, Bullet Points or Make Concise on a section, and read the result against your own notes. For a lecture in another language, Translate to English is one of the built-in actions too.

  • A topic at a time. The cleanup model is small, and I have not tested it on a whole lecture in one pass. One topic at a time is easier to check, and it gives you headings that match the course.
  • Your own notes mode. On the Modes page, right-click Note and choose Duplicate, then write what you want in the Instructions box, such as a list of each term the lecturer defined with the definition in their words and nothing that was not said. Test it with Preview with AI in the Try it out card. The modes guide shows how.
  • Deadlines by ear. Check the transcript yourself for readings, deadlines and anything the lecturer said would be on the exam. A summary can leave out the one line you needed.
  • The same rules. Note mode and the AI actions use AI on your Mac, so whatever your school says about AI tools applies to them. Raw Transcription does not touch it.

The Utility page guide covers all four cards. The transcript is the record, and the notes are a draft you check against it.

YapToText's Switch Mode list: Auto, Raw Transcription, Clean Up, Note, Email, Message and Code Comment, numbered 1 to 7.
Figure 2. Raw Transcription, tagged Verbatim, gives the lecture as it was spoken. Note, tagged AI cleanup, is the one for study notes.

Pick the right tool for each lecture

No single tool does every part of this, and the free ones split the work in a sensible way. Pick by what you need from the lecture: to follow it, to keep it, or to study from it.

Checked October 3, 2026, on Apple's support pages and macwhisper.com. Features change, so check before you rely on one.

What you needUseWhat you getWhat it needs
To follow along in the roomLive Captions, in System Settings, AccessibilityCaptions of the microphone in a window as it happens; Apple's guide describes no transcript to saveApple silicon; not in every language or region
A recording made on your MacNotes, Record AudioThe recording in a note, with a transcript you can copyA Mac with M1 or later and a supported device language
A recording made on your iPhoneVoice MemosA transcript in Voice Memos on the MacmacOS 15 or later on Apple silicon; not in every country or region
Text and notes from any recording fileYapToTextPlain text, your course terms spelled right, and notes from Note modemacOS 14 or later on Apple silicon
Timestamps to jump back to a momentMacWhisper, free version.srt and .vtt subtitle files with timingsA Mac; Pro is €64 once for extras such as speaker recognition

Apple says Live Captions accuracy may vary, so treat it as a way to follow along rather than a record. If you need to know when something was said, MacWhisper's timed subtitles do what YapToText does not, and the MacWhisper comparison has the details.

If the transcript comes back wrong

Lecture halls are hard rooms for a microphone: distance, echo, and long quiet stretches while someone writes on the board. Start with the recording, then the settings. Climb this ladder, smallest step first:

  1. Play the file. If the card says no speech was found, or the text is thin, listen. A voice that is faint at the source is something no model can recover.
  2. Check the quiet parts. YapToText compresses long pauses and removes repetition loops from silence, but check any odd line against the audio and trim long silences from the start and end. Check odd text against the audio, and cut long silences from the start and end of the file. The guide to Whisper hallucinations explains why it happens.
  3. Look at the raw words. Run it with Raw Transcription to see what the model heard before any cleanup.
  4. Check the language. A lecture in another language needs that language, or Auto-detect, on the AI Models page.
  5. Convert the file. If the card shows an error, export the audio to M4A or WAV. For a video, QuickTime Player's File, Export As, Audio Only saves the sound alone, which Apple says is an MPEG 4 audio file with an AAC track.
  6. Use a bigger model. Download one from the Dictation Model Library on the AI Models page and run the file again. A model download is the only network use the app starts.
The AI Models page in YapToText: Whisper Large v3 Turbo (Q5) and Phi-3.5 Mini Instruct marked Included, model library below.
Figure 3. The Language picker for a lecture in another language, and the Dictation Model Library for a bigger model when a recording is hard to hear.

What it cannot do

  • Slides and the board. It only hears audio, so anything the lecturer showed and did not say is not in the transcript.
  • Speaker labels. It does not say who is talking, so nothing marks where a question from the room ends and the lecturer's answer begins.
  • Timestamps. It adds no timecodes, so there is no jump from a line of text to its moment in the recording.
  • Recording. It does not record the lecture or the Mac's system audio. Voice Memos or Notes makes the file.
  • Batches. It takes one file at a time, so a term of lectures goes through one by one.
  • Translation as it transcribes. It writes the lecture in the language it was given. Translate to English, one of the built-in AI Actions, works afterwards.
  • Accuracy promises. I do not publish accuracy numbers. Check anything you will quote, cite or revise from against the recording.
  • Some Macs and builds. It needs macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon, and nothing is claimed for Intel Macs. The Homebrew build ships without models, so download a speech model on the AI Models page first.

It gives you what the lecturer said, not what was on the slides, who asked, or when.

The short version

  • Permission. Ask the lecturer and follow your school's rules before you record.
  • Recording. Voice Memos on your iPhone or Notes on your Mac, and check whether Apple's transcript is already enough.
  • Transcript. Add the course terms to a dictionary, pick Raw Transcription, and drop the file on the Transcribe a file card.
  • Notes. Send a section to Transform text and pick Note, or run Bullet Points or Summarize, then check it against the transcript.

Record with permission, transcribe on your Mac, and study from notes you have checked.

If a lecture recording will not transcribe, press Copy Diagnostics in Settings, About and open an issue on GitHub with the file type. Every one gets read.

Download YapToText on the Mac App StoreDownload for free. No account, nothing locked, macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon. Source on GitHub.

About the author. Ryleigh Newman is a developer whose hands make typing difficult and who dictates every day with YapToText, the app this site describes. Facts about other apps come from their own sites, with the date they were read. More about the project.

Sources

Questions

How do I transcribe a lecture recording on a Mac for free?

Drop the recording on the Transcribe a file card on YapToText's Utility page with Raw Transcription picked, and copy the plain text. It is free, transcribes on your Mac, and needs macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon.

Can I turn a lecture recording into notes automatically?

Yes, as a draft. In YapToText, send the transcript to the Transform text card and pick Note, or run Bullet Points or Summarize, then check the result against the transcript. Those use an on-device AI model, so check your school's rules first.

Am I allowed to record a lecture?

That depends on your lecturer and your school's rules, so ask before you record and read the rules on sharing recordings too. If you need recordings because of a disability, ask your school's disability or accessibility office.

Can I transcribe a lecture offline?

Yes. The App Store build of YapToText ships with its speech model and transcribes on your Mac with Wi-Fi off. The only network use it starts is a model download you choose.

How long a lecture can YapToText transcribe?

It sets no minute cap on a file. A long recording is cut at quiet moments into pieces of about 2 minutes and takes longer, on your Mac's own chip.

Will the transcript include the slides or who asked a question?

No. It only hears the audio, and it adds no speaker labels or timestamps, so slide text and the names of people asking questions are not in it.