OGG to text

1. Export the voice note from the conversation to disk — in most apps that is “share” or “save”.
2. Drag the file onto the field above, whether it ends in .ogg or .opus.
3. Leave language detection on automatic, or pick Polish or English.
4. Read the preview; unlock the full transcript with a one-off payment or subscription hours.

OGG is a container — a box for audio tracks. Opus is a codec — the way the sound inside is encoded. Neither is the other: an OGG container can just as well hold Vorbis or FLAC, and Opus is packaged outside OGG too — in WebM, or as a bare .opus file. A messenger voice note happens to be the most common pairing, Opus in OGG, which is why the same recording turns up with one ending or the other.

In practice you do not have to settle it. We take .ogg, .oga and .opus, and OGG with Vorbis or FLAC inside it too — older files from games or audiobooks, say — and read the audio track in every case. Converting before upload improves nothing, for two different reasons: if what is inside is lossy, transcoding to MP3 piles artefacts on artefacts, and if it is lossless, MP3 introduces them for the first time.

• Telegram saves voice notes as OGG with Opus audio.
• WhatsApp uses the same codec; the exported file may be labelled .opus or .ogg depending on the phone.
• Messenger and Signal more often hand over M4A or AAC — which we also take without conversion.

A voice note is usually the easiest material you can hand to speech recognition, and not because of the format — because of how it was recorded. One person speaks, the phone is held close to the mouth, nobody talks over anybody, and the whole thing lasts under a minute. That is the exact opposite of a meeting room with one microphone in the middle of the table.

Opus handles speech at low bitrates markedly better than older codecs, and was designed for exactly that, so a voice note's small size is not the problem here. The real trouble comes from elsewhere: background — a street, a car, wind — and from talking while moving.

Voice notes rarely arrive one at a time. If you have a whole conversation to transcribe, chopped into a dozen recordings, two things are worth knowing.

• Without an account you can upload 5 recordings a day from one address. That limit protects the free preview rather than pushing you towards more accounts — with an account and a subscription, only recording time counts.
• A very short recording can be refused as too small: a file has to be at least 512 bytes, which in Opus is a fraction of a second. In practice that only ever catches an accidental tap on the record button.
• If your messenger can export a whole conversation, the voice notes come out as separate files — joining them into one before uploading saves both the daily limit and a lot of clicking.

It is also worth remembering whose words these are. Somebody else recorded that voice note, and the transcript is a record of it — sharing it is governed by the same considerations as forwarding the recording itself.

Upload a voice note