TurboScribe Review: Unlimited Whisper Transcription for $10 a Month

TurboScribe is a web app that turns audio and video files into text. It runs on OpenAI's Whisper models and sells one thing: unlimited transcription for a flat price. You upload files, pick a language and an accuracy mode, and get a timestamped transcript back within seconds or minutes. Its founder, Leif, spent close to a decade building AI systems at companies like Meta. The site says it has transcribed more than 4.6 million hours.

What does TurboScribe do?

TurboScribe converts speech in audio and video files to written text. It accepts MP3, MP4, M4A, MOV, WAV, AAC, OGG, OPUS, WMA, MKV, WEBM and most other common formats. You can also paste a YouTube link. Each upload can run up to 10 hours or 5 GB, and paid users can queue 50 files at once.

The app supports speech in 98+ languages. English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese get the best results. The vendor says accuracy drops for less common languages, and it tells you to test with the free tier first. That honesty is rare on a pricing page.

Three transcription modes trade speed for accuracy. Cheetah uses the smallest Whisper model and is the fastest. Dolphin sits in the middle. Whale runs the 1.55 billion parameter Whisper large-v2 model and is the most accurate. Speaker recognition labels who is talking, and it works well for interviews and meetings. Restore Audio cleans background noise before the transcript runs. Both options add a minute or two per hour of audio.

Finished transcripts open in a viewer with a synced audio player. You can export to DOCX, PDF, TXT, CSV, and SRT or VTT subtitle files. A built-in translation tool turns any transcript or subtitle file into 130+ other languages. You can also transcribe any source language straight to English in one pass. A ChatGPT prompt panel lets you summarise or reformat the text, and bulk actions export many files at once.

Which features stand out?

• Unlimited minutes — no monthly cap on the paid plan. The site says its systems are built for at least 720 hours a month per user.
• 10-hour uploads — a single file can be 10 hours or 5 GB, which covers full-day recordings and long lectures.
• Three Whisper modes — Cheetah, Dolphin and Whale let you choose between speed and accuracy per file.
• Speaker recognition — labels each section with the speaker, with auto-detect or a fixed count from 2 to 8.
• Subtitles and translation — export SRT or VTT captions and translate them into 130+ languages from one screen.
• Free daily allowance — 3 transcripts a day of up to 30 minutes each, with no credit card.