Open the voice recorder on your phone and have a scroll. Go on, we will wait.
If you are anything like most of us, you will find a small graveyard of good intentions. "New Recording 14." "New Recording 15." An interview you promised to write up by Friday. A lecture you recorded because you could not keep up with the slides. A rambling voice memo from a walk where you finally cracked that idea, if only you could remember which one it was.
The trouble with audio is that it is easy to capture and miserable to use. You cannot skim it, you cannot search it and you certainly cannot copy a quote out of it. So it sits there. PeekoType for Android fixes that by turning your recordings into text, right there on your phone.
The short version: choose a recording or a video on your phone and PeekoType transcribes it into text using the Small speech model, entirely on the device. Long files are handled a piece at a time, so a two-hour recording is fine, and the job carries on if you leave the app. Nothing is uploaded unless you deliberately switch on the online mode. It is part of the one-off £4.99 unlock.
Who this is for
Almost everyone has a reason to turn audio into text now and then. For some people it is the backbone of the working week.
- Journalists, podcasters and content creators who need accurate quotes from interviews, or a written version of an episode to turn into show notes and blog posts.
- Students who record lectures and seminars (with permission) and want searchable notes to revise from. Our guide to voice typing for students and researchers has more on building a study routine around it.
- Researchers running qualitative interviews or focus groups, where transcription is famously the slowest part of the whole project.
- Small business owners and sole traders who record site visits, client briefs or ideas in the van between jobs, as we describe in voice typing for small business owners.
- Video makers who want the words from a clip as text, for a script, a description or a caption draft.
- Walkers and thinkers who do their best thinking out loud, away from a desk.
How it works on your phone
Open PeekoType, choose "Transcribe a recording" and pick the audio file or video you want. That is it. The app converts it into a working file, reads through it a section at a time using the Small speech model, and builds up your transcript as it goes.
A few thoughtful details make this genuinely usable rather than a party trick:
- Long files are no problem. Because the recording is processed in pieces, a two-hour interview or a full lecture does not need to fit into memory all at once.
- You do not have to sit and watch it. Put the phone down, answer a message, make a cup of tea. The job keeps going in the background and a notification tells you when it has finished.
- Your transcript is kept safe. The most recent transcript is saved in the app's private storage, so it is still there if the app is closed while it works.
- It uses the most accurate offline model. The Small model, at 190 MB, is too large to run inside a keyboard but perfect for this job, where accuracy matters more than instant results.
The Small model is part of the same Whisper family used across PeekoType, trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech in around 100 languages. So yes, that interview you did in Spanish on holiday can be transcribed too.
Your recording never leaves your phone
This is the bit we care about most. Many transcription services work by uploading your audio to their servers. That might be fine for a podcast episode that is going public anyway. It is far less fine for a doctor's appointment, a disciplinary meeting, a confidential client call or a heartfelt conversation with a relative about their memories.
With PeekoType's default settings, the whole recording is transcribed on your phone. The working file lives in the app's own private storage, which no other app can read, and it is deleted the moment the transcript is finished, or if you stop part way through. Nothing is sent anywhere.
That matters for data protection, too. A recording often contains other people's voices and personal details. Keeping the processing on your own device is one of the simplest ways to respect that, which is a theme we explore in why on-device voice typing is GDPR-compliant by design. And whichever tool you use, it is always good manners, and often a legal requirement, to tell people you are recording. The Information Commissioner's Office explains people's rights over their personal information in plain English.
Want it faster? The optional online mode
For some jobs, speed and accuracy beat privacy. A public talk, a webinar you want notes from, a podcast that is already published. For those, PeekoType offers an optional Online AI mode.
It is off when you install the app and stays off until you choose otherwise. To use it, you create your own OpenAI account, generate a key and paste it into PeekoType. Your recording is then sent to OpenAI in pieces, and they bill you directly at their prices. We take no commission and never see your key, and your audio does not pass through any server of ours.
We are honest about the trade-off: in this mode, the recording does leave your phone. That is why the finished transcript always tells you whether it was produced online or on the device, so you never have to guess. For anything sensitive, leave Online AI switched off and let the phone do the work.
Tips for a cleaner transcript
Speech recognition is only as good as the audio you feed it. A few easy habits make a noticeable difference:
- Get the phone close to the speaker. On a table between two people works well. In a pocket or a bag does not.
- Pick the quietest spot you can. A café with a coffee grinder and a playlist is a tough gig for any transcription tool.
- Choose the right language before you start, rather than leaving it to guess.
- Teach it the tricky words. Names such as Siobhan, Aoife or Wojciech, places like Loughborough, and industry jargon are exactly what custom vocabulary is for, and it is included in the same unlock.
- Listen back to the bits that matter. Before you quote someone, check the transcript against the audio. Our honest look at how accurate voice typing really is explains where errors tend to hide.
Need speaker labels, subtitles or a Word document?
The phone is perfect for turning a recording into text wherever you happen to be. If you regularly need more, such as labelling who said what, exporting subtitles for a video, or saving straight to a Word document or PDF, the Windows app is built for that heavier lifting. Have a look at transcribing meetings offline with speaker labels and choosing the right transcript format.
PeekoType for Android and PeekoType for Windows are separate products, bought separately, so pick whichever suits the way you work, or use both.
What it costs
Everyday voice typing on Android is free for good. Transcribing recordings is part of a one-off £4.99 unlock, which also includes the Small model, custom vocabulary, read aloud, the floating microphone, live typing and AI cleanup. No subscription, no monthly minutes allowance, and no per-hour charge when you transcribe offline. Compare that with transcription services that charge by the minute, and a single long interview can pay for the unlock on its own.
If you have not tried the free keyboard yet, start with our guide to offline voice typing on Android. And if you would rather listen than read, read aloud and the floating microphone pair beautifully with a fresh transcript.
Empty the graveyard
Pick one recording tonight. The one you have been meaning to deal with for weeks. Set it transcribing, put the kettle on, and come back to a page of text you can search, copy, quote and actually use. It is a lovely feeling, and it tends to become a habit.