How to turn Discord voice messages into text on a PC

Discord voice messages are recorded on the phone, but Discord’s help center notes that you can listen to them anywhere you use Discord, including the desktop app. What Discord doesn’t do is turn them into text, and the desktop app doesn’t make them easy to save as files either.

The simplest way to get text on a PC is to play the voice message while Vokalu’s Notes listens to your computer’s audio. There is nothing to download and nothing to add to the server.

Play it while Notes listens

1. Open Notes in Vokalu on your Windows PC or Mac. Keep the Meeting notes template, or pick another, then choose Meeting notes. It records your microphone and your computer’s audio as two separate sources.
2. Play the voice message in Discord. Play a whole thread of them back to back if you need to catch up. Stay quiet while they play, so your own voice stays out of the transcript.
3. Choose Stop and write notes. You get the transcript and notes organized by topic, with names, numbers and requests kept. Ask a follow-up question, such as “what did they decide about the raid time?”

You pay 3¢ per minute of talking; silence isn’t billed. Five one-minute voice messages cost 15¢.

If you already have the audio file

Discord voice messages are Ogg audio files. If someone shared the file with you as an attachment, or you saved one, upload it instead: on the Notes page choose Upload a recording and pick the file. Ogg, Opus, MP3, M4A, WAV and video formats work, up to 3 hours.

Some guides get the file out of the app with developer tools or a modified Discord client. Playing it through Notes avoids both.

What about transcription bots?

Bots can transcribe voice messages or voice channels inside a server, but someone with the right permissions has to add them, and they process the audio for everyone in that server. That suits a community that wants captions. If you only want to read what was said to you, a tool on your own computer is less to set up and involves nobody else.

A note on consent

People who send you a voice message expect you to listen to it, not necessarily to have it transcribed. Keep that in mind for personal messages and private servers.

Vokalu never saves the audio. Only speech is sent to be transcribed, and the transcript and notes stay on your computer unless you share them. How transcribing recordings works.