How to convert a video to text
Three steps. Download SnailText for Mac or Windows, open the app and drop in your video file, and read the transcript a moment later. No upload step, no sign-up, no minutes to buy — the speech model runs on your own machine, so it is free with no minute meter.
The first time you transcribe a video, SnailText fetches the video decoder (FFmpeg) with one click and installs it for you. After that it just works. Supported files: MP4, MKV, MOV, and WebM.
Get a transcript from a video file
Whatever the source — a screen recording, a webinar export, a recorded call, a lecture, a Zoom download — if it is a video file on your disk, SnailText pulls the words out of it and gives you the transcript of the video as editable text.
You can transcribe a single video, or point it at a folder and get a transcript from every video in one run. Export each as its own file, or all of them into one document.
AI video transcript, on your device
The transcription uses the same on-device AI speech models SnailText runs for dictation — OpenAI Whisper, and NVIDIA Parakeet on Pro. It is an AI video transcript, but the AI runs locally: your video never leaves the computer, and there is no cloud account in the loop. It runs on your CPU, so no graphics card is required — a GPU only makes it faster.
On Pro, an optional AI post-processing pass can go further — fixing errors, adjusting the writing style, or translating the transcript — still without anything leaving your machine. That step needs a GPU with 6 GB of VRAM or more; plain transcription does not.
Transcribe MP4, MKV, MOV and WebM to text
SnailText transcribes the common video containers directly once the one-click decoder is installed: MP4, MKV, MOV, and WebM. Output is your choice of plain text (.txt), Markdown (.md), or JSON.
It produces a written transcript, not timed subtitle files — there is no SRT or VTT export. If you only need the words (notes, a searchable record, a draft), that is exactly what you get. Working from audio files instead? Or transcribe a whole folder at once.