Transcribe your recording

Open the Words tab (⌘2) and click Transcribe. Transcription runs on your Mac, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Click Words in the tabs on the right, or press ⌘2.
Click Transcribe. The first time, you may need Download & transcribe, which downloads the speech model.
Wait a moment. A message says how many words were found, and captions turn on.

Your voice never leaves your Mac. Transcription works offline once the model is downloaded.

Better results

Click the gear at the top of the transcript for Transcription settings:

Setting	What it does
Recogniser	Apple Speech (on macOS 26) or Whisper. Whisper comes in Base (148 MB), Small (488 MB) and Medium (1.5 GB). Larger models are more accurate and slower.
Language	The language you speak, or Detect language to let Whisper work it out.
Key terms	Names, products and jargon, comma separated, such as "Cinemac, Ana Lima". The recogniser prefers these spellings.

Click Transcribe everything again to redo the transcript with the new settings.

When you record another part, click Transcribe new takes. Only the new recordings are transcribed, and corrections you made elsewhere stay.

Cut by editing words: delete words to cut the video, and remove filler words.
Add captions.
Export captions as SRT… (in File or ⌘K) saves a subtitle file for YouTube and other players.