Voicemail to Text — Clean Transcript from Any Voicemail

Get the voicemail off your phone as an audio file, then upload it here. On iPhone: open Voice Mail in the Phone app, tap the voicemail, tap Share, tap Save to Files — this saves an .m4a. Drop the file into the uploader. On Android: most stock voicemail apps have a Share or Save option that outputs .m4a, .amr, or .mp3. Google Voice: in the web app at voice.google.com, click a message and download the .mp3. Business voicemail systems (RingCentral, 8x8, Nextiva) typically email the recording as an .mp3 attachment — drop the attachment in directly. Once uploaded, OpenAI Whisper Large-v3 transcribes the audio in about 5-15 seconds for a typical 30-second voicemail. Free preview shows the first 200 characters; a free account (email only) unlocks the full transcript.

The preview is free with no signup — you'll see the first 200 characters of the transcript, which for a typical 30-second voicemail (60-90 words) is roughly half the message. Enough to know if it's an important callback or a robocall. A free VexaScribe account (email only, no credit card) unlocks the full transcript plus 30 minutes/month of transcription — enough for roughly 60 average voicemails per month. Paid plans start at $2/month for 200 minutes if you need higher volume. Carrier-provided voicemail transcription (Verizon Visual Voicemail, T-Mobile Visual Voicemail, iOS 18 native transcription) is also free but has lower accuracy for accented speakers, noisy audio, and non-English languages.

Carrier voicemail transcription is designed for near-instant delivery on constrained infrastructure, not for accuracy. Verizon and T-Mobile use different ASR engines under the hood, tuned mostly for American English on clean audio. In independent testing, carrier voicemail transcription typically hits 70-85% word accuracy — meaning 15-30 words in every 100 are wrong. Common failure modes: proper nouns replaced with common words ("Sarah" becomes "say"), phone numbers scrambled by one digit, non-English messages returned as gibberish, callback times mangled. Our tool uses OpenAI Whisper Large-v3 — the same model on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard that leads accuracy benchmarks — and typically hits 92-96% on typical voicemail audio.

Every common voicemail export format is supported: M4A (iPhone Voice Mail default, Google Voice, most modern voicemail apps), MP3 (Google Voice web downloads, RingCentral, most business voicemail email attachments), AMR (many older Android stock voicemail apps), WAV (Windows-based voicemail systems, some VoIP business systems), AAC (some carrier apps), and OGG/OPUS (WhatsApp voice messages, if you're processing those). Also accepted: FLAC, WMA, AIFF. Maximum file size is 500 MB — more than any voicemail will ever need. Max duration 4 hours — same. If your voicemail exports in a format we don't accept, download it and convert with a free tool like fre:ac or Audacity, then upload the converted file.

Open the Phone app. Tap Voicemail (bottom right). Tap the voicemail you want to transcribe. Tap the Share button (square with an arrow pointing up). Choose Save to Files. Pick a location (iCloud Drive or On My iPhone). The voicemail saves as an .m4a file. Open the Files app, drag the file into a browser window on this page — or use the Files app share sheet to open it directly here. If the Share button doesn't appear, your voicemail is a Visual Voicemail that's still on your carrier's server; download it first by tapping the audio waveform to buffer it fully. Note: iOS 18 added on-device voicemail transcription, but it's English-only and doesn't work for calls from unknown numbers reliably — our tool is worth it for non-English messages, older iOS versions, and messages where you want to save the transcript.

Behavior varies by phone maker and carrier, so try in this order. Stock Google Phone app (Pixel, some Samsungs): open Voicemail, tap the message, tap the three-dot menu, choose Save — outputs .m4a or .3gp. Samsung Voicemail: tap the message, tap the download arrow, saves to Downloads folder as .amr or .m4a. Verizon/AT&T carrier apps: usually offer Share to Messages or Email — email the voicemail to yourself and open the attachment. Google Voice (any Android): open voice.google.com, click the message, click the download arrow — .mp3 file. Once you have the file, drag it into this page's uploader. If your voicemail app has no export at all, use a call recorder app to re-record the voicemail while playing it back — awkward but works as a last resort.

Yes. Google Voice already sends you an auto-transcription in the email notification, but the accuracy is inconsistent — especially for callers with accents or in noisy environments. To get a cleaner transcript from us: open voice.google.com, click the voicemail, click the three-dot menu, click Download — you'll get an .mp3. Drop the .mp3 into our uploader. Common reason people re-transcribe Google Voice messages: the original transcription butchered a callback phone number, a name, or an address, and getting it right actually matters (returning a call, following up on a lead, catching a callback window). Whisper Large-v3 handles phone numbers, proper nouns, and accented speech noticeably better than Google Voice's built-in engine.

Uploads travel over TLS 1.2+ encryption and are stored encrypted at rest in AWS eu-west-2 (Ireland). We do not train AI models on your voicemail audio, transcript, or metadata. We do not sell user data. You control retention — delete the file and the transcript from your dashboard at any time, and account deletion is self-serve. For particularly sensitive voicemails (legal callbacks, medical results, business-confidential), delete the file as soon as you've downloaded the transcript. Full editorial and privacy details at /about/editorial-standards and /privacy. If the message is subject to attorney-client privilege or HIPAA, use human transcription with a signed BAA instead — AI vendors including ours don't offer BAAs for this pricing tier.

Yes, on paid plans. Free accounts transcribe one file at a time. Bulk upload — drop a folder of voicemail files, get a batch of transcripts back with each file's filename preserved — is available on Starter ($2/mo) and up. Common use case: a business owner exports their weekly voicemail archive from a VoIP system, drops the whole folder in, gets a searchable transcript archive with timestamps for each message. See /bulk-transcription for the batch workflow specifically. Rate limit for batch uploads is 100 files per batch; larger archives can be uploaded in multiple batches back-to-back.

Voxist, YouMail, and similar apps are voicemail replacement services — you install the app, forward your carrier voicemail to them, and every new voicemail is automatically transcribed and delivered to the app. They're the right choice if you want ongoing automatic transcription of every future voicemail. Our tool is different: it's for one-shot transcription of a specific voicemail file you already have. Common reasons people use us instead of an app: they don't want to change their voicemail routing, they have an older voicemail saved somewhere they want to transcribe now, they need higher accuracy than the app provided for a specific important message, or the message is in a language the app doesn't handle. We're complements, not substitutes.