Free transcription apps for students: what to compare

Which limit will stop you first on a free transcription app?

The first limit to check is the cap per recording. This is the one that surprises students most often, because a plan can advertise hundreds of free monthly minutes and still cut off a single lecture halfway through. Notta's free plan caps each conversation at 3 minutes (120 minutes a month), Otter.ai's free plan stops at 30 minutes per conversation, and TurboScribe allows three free files a day of up to 30 minutes each — so none of them delivers a full 50-minute lecture transcript without an upgrade.

Before you commit to a free plan, work through this checklist in order, because each limit tends to bite in sequence:

1. Limit per recording. The maximum length of a single file or live session you can actually use. Notta free: 3 minutes per conversation. Otter free: 30 minutes. TurboScribe free: 30 minutes per file, three files a day.
2. Monthly minutes. The total pool across all recordings. Otter free offers 300 minutes a month (a shared pool across all transcription types); Notta free offers 120 minutes a month; MeetGeek offers 3 transcription hours a month.
3. Upload or import counts. How many files you can bring in. Notta free allows 50 uploads; Otter free allows just 3 lifetime imports.
4. Export formats. Whether you can actually get the transcript out, and in which formats. Otter free exports mp3 and txt only; Notta lists TXT, DOCX, PDF and SRT exports under its Pro plan.
5. AI-summary limits. How many AI summaries or credits you get. Notta free includes 10 AI summaries a month; Otter free includes 20 AI Chat queries a month (3 per conversation); Fireflies gives 20 AI credits.
6. History and storage. How long recordings are kept and how much storage you get. Fireflies, for example, caps free-team storage at 400 minutes.

If you only remember one thing: the per-recording limit, not the monthly total, is usually what stops a lecture transcript dead.

How do the main free plans compare?

The table below lines up the free plans side by side, using figures verified against each provider's pricing page on 29 October 2026.

*Fireflies' "unlimited transcription" carries an asterisk on its pricing page — read the footnote before relying on it.

For students, the standout differences are at the extremes. Notta's free plan is the most generous for many short recordings: 50 uploads and 10 AI summaries a month suit seminar clips, interview snippets and revision notes, even though the free tier's 3-minute cap per conversation rules out full lectures. Otter's free plan offers more monthly minutes (300) and a 30-minute per-conversation cap, but only 3 lifetime imports, which hurts if your lectures arrive as audio files. TurboScribe sits in between, with three 30-minute files a day. Meeting-bot tools such as tl;dv, Read AI and MeetGeek are listed for context — most of their free value is for online meetings rather than hall recordings.

If you expect to stay on a free plan for a while and your recordings are short, Notta's upload and summary allowances go further than most. If your recordings are long, skip to the on-device options below.

Which free options have no minute limits?

For a full lecture at no cost, on-device transcription is the only category with no minute cap:

• Apple Notes (iPhone 12 and later): on-device audio recording and transcription in 10 device languages. AI summaries require Apple Intelligence.
• Google Recorder (Pixel phones): uncapped recording and transcription. Summaries require a Pixel 8 or later.
• MacWhisper Free (Mac): runs local Whisper models on files and microphone audio, with support for around 100 languages. A third-party reading of the official table suggests txt, srt and vtt exports are included in the free version.
• Google Live Transcribe (Android): free real-time captions, but it is a captioning tool, not a note taker — it does not save a transcript you can export and study from.

The trade-offs are real: these options are device-locked (a Pixel recording stays on your Pixel; MacWhisper needs your Mac in the room), they offer fewer export formats and smaller speech models than cloud services, and they do not generate AI summaries or meeting notes the way Notta or Otter do. But for the specific question "can I transcribe a 90-minute lecture for free?", they are the honest answer.

A practical split for many students: use an on-device app for the full lecture recording, and a cloud plan like Notta's for the short clips, uploads and AI summaries it handles without a fee.

Can you export a free transcript?

A transcript you cannot export is a transcript you cannot revise from, so check export rules before you rely on a free plan:

• Otter free: exports mp3 and txt only. PDF, DOCX and SRT exports require a paid plan.
• Notta free: the free plan caps each conversation at 3 minutes, per the pricing page. TXT, DOCX, PDF and SRT exports are listed under the Pro plan — so on Notta, the export question is really an upgrade question.
• MacWhisper free: txt, srt and vtt exports, according to a third-party reading of the official table (the official table and the Gumroad listing disagree, so confirm before relying on it).
• Fireflies free: transcript downloads are a paid-tier feature.

The pattern to watch for: free plans that let you record and read on screen, but gate the export. If your workflow depends on pasting transcripts into notes, a word processor or a citation manager, verify the export format on the free tier first. Notta's Pro plan covers TXT, DOCX, PDF and SRT — useful if you need subtitles (SRT) or formatted documents — and its advertised education discount makes that upgrade cheaper for students than most alternatives.

How many free AI summaries do you get?

AI summaries are where free plans pinch hardest, because they are metered separately from transcription minutes:

• Notta free: 10 AI summaries per month.
• Otter free: 20 AI Chat queries per month, limited to 3 per conversation.
• Fireflies free: 20 AI credits.
• Descript free: 100 one-time AI credits (not monthly).

For students, Notta's 10 AI summaries a month are the most directly useful allowance here: unlike Otter's chat queries, each one turns a recording into a written summary you can revise from, and they sit alongside 50 free uploads. Ten summaries a month roughly covers a weekly seminar or a batch of interview clips. Otter's 20 queries are spread across conversations rather than full summaries, and Fireflies' credits are geared to meeting recaps.

If you burn through the free allowance, that is usually the moment a student discount starts to look better than a free plan — which is the next question.

Is a student discount better than a free plan?

Often, yes. Once you hit a per-recording cap or an export wall, the cheapest way out is usually an education discount rather than a standard subscription:

• Notta: advertises a 50% education discount. Applied to the Pro plan at $97.99 a year, that works out to roughly $49 a year — less than Otter's .edu plan — and it removes the free plan's 3-minute cap per conversation, with paid plans supporting recordings of up to 5 hours and TXT, DOCX, PDF and SRT exports.
• Otter.ai: .edu plan at $79.99 a year; Pro is $8.33/month billed annually.
• Genio: 30-day trial, then paid.
• Microsoft 365 Transcribe: 300 minutes of uploaded audio per month is included for Microsoft 365 subscribers — check whether your university licence includes it before paying anyone.

The comparison worth doing is cost per useful transcript. A free plan that truncates a 50-minute lecture at 3 minutes delivers zero useful transcripts for that lecture; a discounted plan that transcribes it fully, exports it as DOCX and summarises it may cost less per month than a coffee. For students recording regularly, Notta's education discount plus its 5-hour paid recording cap and multi-format exports is one of the strongest value routes from free to usable.

What happens to your recordings on a free plan?

The last thing to compare is what the provider does with your recordings after the transcript appears:

• History limits. Free plans may keep recordings for a shorter period than paid plans. Check each plan's history and deletion rules — for example, how long recordings are kept before they are removed.
• Storage caps. Fireflies caps free-team storage at 400 minutes; once the pool fills, older material has to go.
• AI-training and privacy terms. Some free plans include your audio in AI training or analytics by default. If your recordings include other people — classmates, interviewees, lecturers — read the privacy terms before uploading.
• University data rules. If you are transcribing for coursework or research, your university's data-handling rules may restrict which services you can upload recordings to, especially for interviews involving human participants.

None of these limits shows up on a pricing page's headline, but any one of them can end a free workflow mid-semester. A quick rule: if the recording contains someone else's voice, confirm where it is stored, how long it is kept, and whether it trains a model — on whichever plan you choose, free or paid.