Transcribe.fm is a lightning-fast transcription service for podcasters. We can transcribe an hour of audio to in just 30 seconds with speaker diarization & word-by-word fidelity. Pay what you want in Satoshis using a Lightning wallet.

Our ASR proivder measured their own accuracy at 90.5% compared to OpenAI’s Whisper model at 83.8-87.6%

It can perform at 120x real-time speed, which means that you can transcribe an hour of audio in just 30 seconds.

We offer a flexible pay-what-you-want model. To cover our costs, we’ve set a small minimum based on the duration of the audio.

Yes! We support the new L402 Protocol, previously known as LSAT, to charge Lightning payments for API requests.

To request an invoice, submit an audio_url to https://transcribe.fm/api/v1/transcribe.

fetch("https://transcribe.fm/api/v1/transcribe", {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    "audio_url": "https://podnews.net/audio/podnews230717.mp3"
  })
})

In response, the server will reply with a 402 (Payment Required) status code and a WWW-Authenticate header ([RFC 7235], Section 4.1), containing a macaroon and a Lightning invoice, like this:

HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required

Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2014 16:50:53 GMT

WWW-Authenticate: L402 macaroon="AGIAJEemVQUTEyNCR0exk7ek90Cg==", invoice="lnbc1500n1pw5kjhmpp5fu6xhthlt2vucmzkx6c7wtlh2r625r30cyjsfqhu8rsx4xpz5lwqdpa2fjkzep6yptksct5yp5hxgrrv96hx6twvusycn3qv9jx7ur5d9hkugr5dusx6cqzpgxqr23s79ruapxc4j5uskt4htly2salw4drq979d7rcela9wz02elhypmdzmzlnxuknpgfyfm86pntt8vvkvffma5qc9n50h4mvqhngadqy3ngqjcym5a"

The client can then pay the Lightning invoice to reveal the preimage.

By including the macaroon and the preimage in an Authorization header, you can call the /transcribe endpoint again. This will return a transcript_id, while the audio is being transcribed. To retreive the transcript itself, a subsequent request is needed.

fetch("https://transcribe.fm/api/v1/transcribe", {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    Authorization: 'L402 AGIAJEemVQUTEyNCR0exk7ek90Cg==:1234abcd1234abcd1234abcd'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    "audio_url": "https://podnews.net/audio/podnews230717.mp3"
  })
})

With a transcript_id, you can request a transcript by including an Accept header with a supported MIME type. The value must be one one the following:

• application/json
• application/x-subrip
• text/vtt
• text/plain

fetch(`https://transcribe.fm/api/v1/download/${transcript_id}`, {
  method: 'GET',
  headers: {
    Accept: 'text/plain'
  }
});