M4A to text
Most of these are iPhone Voice Memos recordings. There is no need to convert them.
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In short
You can upload an M4A without converting it — it is the standard AAC container that Voice Memos on iPhone and iPad uses. The recording becomes text with timestamps and speaker labels, and you see a preview without an account. An hour of voice memo is usually 30–60 MB, so the 5 GB limit is not a constraint here.
How to do it
- Open Voice Memos on your iPhone, tap the recording and choose Share.
- Save the file to Files, or send it to your computer.
- Upload the M4A here — no conversion needed.
- A recording up to 5 minutes reads in full straight away, for free. A longer one shows its first 5 minutes; you unlock the rest with a one-off payment for that recording or with subscription hours.
What M4A actually is
M4A is an MPEG-4 container holding audio only, usually compressed with AAC. Technically it is MP4's twin without the video track — which is why both extensions are handled identically here and both can be uploaded as they are.
At the same bitrate AAC sounds slightly better than MP3, but that is irrelevant to transcription: the model recognises speech, not timbre fidelity. Converting M4A to MP3 “to be safe” only degrades the file and gains nothing.
Getting the recording off an iPhone
This is the step people actually get stuck on — the upload itself is trivial. Sharing from inside the Voice Memos app is the simplest route.
- Open Voice Memos and tap the recording you want transcribed.
- Tap the three dots, then Share.
- Choose Save to Files to upload from the phone, or AirDrop or email if the computer is easier.
- Open this page on whichever device holds the file and drop it onto the upload field.
iPhone recordings are saved either compressed or lossless — the setting lives in system Settings, under Voice Memos. Both are supported; lossless simply produces a much larger file.
Voice notes from messaging apps
Messenger and Signal usually hand over voice notes as M4A or AAC, so those land here without conversion. WhatsApp and Telegram use something else — the file ends in .ogg or .opus and has a page of its own, because it behaves differently.
- Audio: MP3, M4A, WAV, AAC, OGG, Opus, FLAC, AIFF, WMA, AMR and other sound formats.
- Video: MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WMV, WebM and others — we read the audio track out of them, so there is nothing to convert.
- Recordings are stored privately, and anonymous uploads expire by themselves.
Questions
Do I need to convert M4A to MP3?
No. M4A is supported directly. Converting to MP3 improves nothing — at the same bitrate AAC is at least as good, and re-encoding only takes quality away.
How do I transcribe an iPhone Voice Memo?
In Voice Memos, tap the recording, choose Share and save it to Files or send it to your computer. Then upload it here — it is an M4A file and needs no conversion.
What is the difference between M4A and MP4?
The same container — M4A holds audio only, while MP4 usually also holds video. You can upload either as it is; from an MP4 we simply read the audio track.
What about WhatsApp voice messages?
Those are not M4A — WhatsApp and Telegram write Opus audio in an OGG container. We take them without conversion just the same; the details live on the OGG page.