A MacWhisper alternative built for voice notes

Two good tools for different jobs

MacWhisper is a well made Mac app that transcribes audio and video files on your own computer with OpenAI's Whisper model. People use it for meetings, interviews, podcasts and lectures: long recordings you open one at a time.

InkSaid also transcribes on your own Mac. It is built for a different shape of audio: short voice notes from WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, arriving all day from many people, where the hard part is not the transcription but keeping track of who said what.

If you mostly transcribe meetings and long recordings, MacWhisper is a strong choice. If your audio is voice notes in chats, read on.

What InkSaid adds for voice notes

• It picks notes up on its own. Save a voice note from WhatsApp on your Mac, or AirDrop it from your iPhone, and InkSaid transcribes it without you opening anything.
• It remembers every note. On Pro, every transcript goes into a private archive on your Mac, filed by person and by chat.
• You can search what people said. Type a name, a price or a place, and find the voice note it was spoken in, months later.
• It imports whole chats. Drop in a WhatsApp chat export and every voice note is transcribed in place, with the sender and the time, ready to save as a PDF.
• It works from your iPhone. Share a voice note from any chat app on your phone, and the words come back from your Mac.
• Your AI assistant can read it. Connect Claude and ask what someone told you last week. The notes stay on your Mac.

What stays the same

• Private by design. Transcription runs on your Mac, and the audio is not sent to our servers.
• Many languages. Both are built on Whisper, which handles dozens of languages. InkSaid works in 99.
• Apple silicon. InkSaid needs a Mac with an Apple chip.

Which one to pick

InkSaid's transcription is free and unlimited on your Mac. Pro, which keeps and searches your notes, is $79 a year.

MacWhisper is a trademark of its owner. InkSaid is not affiliated with it.