Transcribe a lecture on your Mac.

Record it right, and ask first

Recording someone teaching is recording someone. Ask, or check the course policy; if you have accessibility needs, your university’s disability office usually has a formal route that also gets you better audio. Many institutions already capture lectures centrally (Panopto and similar systems), in which case your job is downloading a file, not recording one.

If you are recording it yourself, the phone on the desk is fine. Voice Memos on an iPhone produces an M4A that AirDrops to your Mac in seconds, and any handheld recorder’s files work the same way.

Getting the recording into text

The file comes over however suits you: AirDrop from the phone, a download from the lecture-capture portal, a cable from a recorder. Nothing about the transcription cares which.

Check whether the Mac will do it for nothing first. On macOS 15 or later with Apple silicon, Voice Memos transcribes recordings in place, though Apple notes the feature has not reached every country. For a lecture that is one person talking steadily, that is often the end of it.

Where it stops being enough is seminars, panels, and anything with questions from the room, because a transcript that runs several voices together is close to unreadable. That is the case for an app that separates them. Edict does it on your Mac at roughly 150x real time, so an hour of audio comes back in about 24 seconds with each speaker labelled, exported as plain text, SRT, or VTT.

What the transcript is actually for

A transcript isn’t notes; it’s the raw material notes come from. What it gives you: search ("where did she define entropy"), exact quotes with timestamps (SRT and VTT keep them, so you can jump back to the moment in the recording), and something an AI can work with. Paste the text into whatever assistant you use for summaries or flashcards, or skip the paste: Edict ships an MCP server, so an agent like Claude can submit the recording itself, get the transcript back, and build the study notes, with the audio never leaving your Mac.

The student math

Edict is a one-time purchase with a 7-day fully functional trial, which is long enough to transcribe a whole term’s backlog and decide honestly. Start with the free options: Voice Memos costs nothing, and MacWhisper’s free tier and Spokenly’s free local transcription both handle files on-device too. Buy only when the workflow around the transcript starts to matter: speaker labels, timestamped exports, the agent integration, and dictation for writing the essay afterwards.

Common questions