WhisperBoard: Voice to Text

Completely free. No ads, no subscription, no licensing. Absolutely free. Peak app honestly. Absolutely amazing, 10 out of 10. Almost every other app on here has some sort of monetization, and most if not all use the same exact Whisper tech used in this app. This one downloads the model directly from OpenAI and lets you run them locally on your device. This bears no hosting cost on the dev of this app, thus making it possible to offer for free! The Whisper models are free and open source, and you have access to 21 different Whisper models, all tuned for varying degrees of quality and performance. Even the smallest model works great. The bigger models run fine on my iPhone 14 but I’m limited by RAM. The biggest model should run perfectly on my M2 iPad Air. Genuinely amazing work, thank you so much.

Quite simply put, this is the app you want if you need speech-to-text on your iPad. It's simple, it's free, no ads, no obtrusive elements at all, and it uses the open source Whisper framework, which is very well established and produces excellent text from human speech. You can load audio files to transcribe or you can recordings directly in the app. I really couldn't ask for much more here. A note for users who aren't familiar with the Whisper framework: you have to download models for the app. If you go into settings, you can select the model you want to use and thr app will download it. It comes with the ‘tiny’ model, which is fast but not as accurate as the larger models. If you want very high accuracy and are willing to have a slow transcribe rate, then I would recommend downloading a larger model though the settings. I’m really thankful to the dev for making this. Absolutely fantastic. (This review was written with speech to text using WhisperBoard)

I never leave reviews. This app is fantastic though. I've been searching for a voice transcription app that was accurate enough for me to use for writing, for work, for all sorts of different purposes. And even the paid apps and subscriptions that I was looking at just did not deliver. I was nervous about downloading this app because it's been created for the last four years but only has 54 ratings and that didn't seem super reliable to me and it was free. But this is genuinely a great app. I'm pasting this review. I'm not editing the words here at all. That's how accurate the transcription is. I have spoken this entire review.