TrainScription — Local AI Transcription
Summary
Every cloud-based transcription tool joins your meeting as a visible bot participant — a problem when the conversation involves a client's pending litigation, a compliance review, or a nonpublic financial filing.
TrainScription runs Whisper entirely in your browser via WebAssembly, processing audio in 5-second chunks that are never written to disk and never leave the machine. The Phonetic Brain lets you highlight a misfire — a misspelled proper noun, an industry term Whisper mangles — and that correction fires automatically on every future session. Browser Tab mode covers Google Meet, Teams web, Zoom web, and any other browser-based call; Full Desktop mode, which captures all system audio, is a paid-only feature. The free tier caps sessions, so heavy users who record three or four long calls daily will hit that ceiling and either upgrade or find the cap disruptive. There is no API, no mobile path, and no way to push transcripts into a downstream system without manual export.
Bottom line: Pick this for legal or finance conversations where routing audio through a third-party server is a non-starter — and plan a different stack the moment you need transcripts to feed automatically into a CRM, case management system, or any pipeline that can't tolerate a manual .txt export step.
Pricing Plans
Flat RateLast verified 2 weeks ago- Price
- $9.99
- Free Tier
- 15-minute cap on sessions
Free
Free tier with session duration limits
- Browser Tab or Desktop App capture
- Dual-channel audio (microphone and meeting audio)
- Local Whisper AI transcription via WebAssembly
- Live transcript with speaker labels and timestamps
- Phonetic Brain corrections
- 15-minute session cap
- Session recovery
- Export to .txt and .srt
Pro
One-time $9.99 Pro unlock u2014 forever
- Unlimited session duration
- Audio & Video File Import
- Full Desktop Mode for any app
- Bulk Export, Backup & Restore
- Complete phonetic brain backup and restore
- All Free tier features
View full pricing on trainscription.com →
Pricing may have changed since last verified. Check the official site for current plans.
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Pros
Sign in to edit- All transcription runs locally via WebAssembly with zero network calls during a session, which means audio from privileged conversations — legal strategy, M&A discussions, compliance reviews — never touches a third-party server.
- No bot joins the call as a participant in either mode, so the other party has no indication the conversation is being transcribed, which matters in client-facing or sensitive negotiations.
- The trainable Phonetic Brain permanently maps phonetic misfires to correct spellings after a single correction, so domain-specific terms — proper nouns, filing codes, product names — stop breaking after the first session that introduces them.
- The one-time payment for Pro unlocks unlimited sessions and Full Desktop mode with no recurring charge, which removes the cost accumulation problem for professionals who transcribe daily.
- Sessions are automatically segmented and grouped in Recovery with full post-session correction capability, so a dropped connection or long meeting does not mean losing the transcript or having to re-review from scratch.
Cons
Sign in to edit- The free tier caps session count, and professionals running three or more long calls per day will exhaust the free allowance quickly — the next step is the paid upgrade or accepting interrupted workflows mid-week.
- There is no API and no automated export path, so any team that needs transcripts to arrive in a CRM, document management system, or case file without a manual download step has to build that handoff themselves — and at the point where that overhead becomes a daily tax, teams move to a cloud transcription service that offers a webhook or native integration, accepting the privacy trade-off in exchange.
- Full Desktop mode, which is required for native app meeting clients like Teams desktop or Zoom desktop, is a paid-only feature — teams on those apps who want to evaluate the tool on the free tier cannot test the primary capture mode they would actually use in production.
- Whisper's accuracy on heavily accented speech or fast cross-talk degrades, and while the Phonetic Brain corrects recurring proper-noun errors, it does not address the underlying model's accuracy ceiling — teams transcribing multilingual calls or high-interruption conversations will find a residual error rate that manual correction does not eliminate.
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About
- Platforms
- Chrome browser (extension); desktop audio via Pro mode
- API Available
- No
- Self-Hosted
- No
- Last Updated
- 2026-06-14T13:17:34.671Z
Best For
Who it's for
- Privacy-conscious professionals
- Users with domain-specific terminology
- Chrome-based meeting workflows
- One-time payment preference
What it does well
- Legal and finance meetings with sensitive data
- Researcher and interviewer recordings
- Specialized vocabulary transcription in consulting
- Heavy meeting users avoiding recurring subscriptions
Integrations
Discussion Community
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Compare TrainScription — Local AI Transcription
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is TrainScription free?
- TrainScription has a permanent free tier alongside paid upgrades (paid plans from $9.99). You can keep using a baseline version indefinitely without paying.
- Is TrainScription open source?
- No — TrainScription is a closed-source tool. Source code is not publicly available.
- What platforms does TrainScription support?
- TrainScription is available on: Chrome browser (extension); desktop audio via Pro mode.
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Curated lists that include this category
TrainScription is a Chrome extension that transcribes meetings and calls entirely on the user’s device, with no cloud processing, no account requirement, and no bot joining the call as a participant. The vendor describes the pipeline as: audio captured from two independent channels (microphone and meeting audio), passed through a local Web Audio graph with a silence gate, processed by Whisper running via WebAssembly in the browser, corrected by the Phonetic Brain, and then written to a local transcript with speaker labels and timestamps. Export produces a .txt or .srt file stored on the user’s machine.
The differentiating feature is the trainable Phonetic Brain. When Whisper mishears a term — a client surname, a regulatory filing code, a product name — the user highlights it in the live Studio view and assigns the correct spelling in one click. That phonetic mapping persists and fires silently on every future transcript before the text is displayed. For domains with dense specialized vocabulary — consulting, legal, finance, biotech — this compounds over time in a way that a generic cloud transcription service, which resets context on every call, does not.
The tool fits Chrome-based workflows where the priority is confidentiality and vocabulary accuracy, not integration. Browser Tab mode handles any browser-based meeting without any participant seeing a bot join the call. Full Desktop mode, which captures system audio from native apps like the Teams desktop client or Zoom desktop, is a paid-only feature. The free tier limits session count, which creates friction for professionals who run back-to-back calls daily. There is no API surface, no self-hosted option beyond the extension itself, and no path to push transcripts downstream without a manual export — so any team that needs transcripts to land automatically in a ticketing system, CRM, or document store will need to build that step themselves or choose a different tool.
The extension operates under Chrome Manifest V3, works offline once installed, and requires no API key at any tier. Audio chunks are described by the vendor as volatile and never written to disk during processing. Sessions are segmented automatically for long recordings, grouped under a single session in Recovery, and can be exported per-segment or as a full session. Custom session labels are supported.