What is the best tool for audio to text transcription?

I prefer keeping recordings on my own computer when they contain meetings or personal notes, rather than uploading everything to an online service. jvosk is one option I found useful for AI audio to text transcription because the speech recognition runs locally and the interface is fairly straightforward for regular transcription work

AI audio to text transcription guide

Step 1: Get the program from its project page and download the Vosk model for the language in your recording.

Step 2: Open the program and load the language model you want to use.

Step 3: Choose the audio recording that needs to be converted into text.

Step 4: Start the transcription and wait for the recording to be processed locally.

Step 5: Read through the generated text and correct any words that were affected by background noise, accents, or unclear speech.

What I like about this approach is that the recording can stay on the PC instead of being sent to a cloud service. The results still depend quite a lot on the recording itself, so clean audio and a suitable language model make a noticeable difference, especially with longer conversations.