Hear2Text

AVI to Text Converter

Upload an AVI video from an old camcorder, a Windows screen recorder or your archive and get a timestamped transcript you can edit and export. The language is detected automatically. The free plan gives you 120 minutes every week.

Transcribe an AVI file

Paste a link to the file, or press Transcribe to upload it

Free plan: 120 minutes every week. Files up to 500 MB and 6 hours.

Upload AVI files straight from the drive

AVI files come from older camcorders, Windows screen recorders, capture cards and years of archived footage. Hear2Text takes the file as it is and transcribes its audio track, whatever video codec was used. The catch is size: AVI often stores lightly compressed video, so a single hour can exceed the 500 MB upload limit. When that happens, extract the audio to MP3 or M4A, or re-encode to a smaller MP4 — the transcript comes out the same. Recordings can run up to 6 hours.

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Find out what is on old tapes and archives

Family camcorder tapes, recorded talks and interviews from the 2000s, and old training videos often survive only as AVI files that nobody watches because nobody knows what is in them. A transcript fixes that: every segment has a timestamp, so you can scan the text and jump to the part that matters. The language is detected automatically, so recordings in any of 100 languages need no setup. Accuracy depends on the original sound: a voice close to the microphone transcribes well, while a crowded room recorded from across it will need more corrections.

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Ask questions about your old footage

Old footage rarely comes with notes. Once an AVI file is transcribed, ask the assistant what a tape covers, who speaks about what, or where a particular event is mentioned, and use the answers to label and file the recording. The assistant is part of the paid plans.

  • Summarise a long recording
  • Pull out names, places and dates
  • Find the moment a topic comes up
  • Write a catalogue entry for a tape
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How to transcribe an AVI file

From an AVI file on your drive to editable, timestamped text in minutes.

  1. Step 01

    Upload the AVI file

    Choose the AVI file from your computer or external drive. If it is over 500 MB, upload its audio track instead.

  2. Step 02

    Speech becomes text

    The spoken language is detected automatically and the audio track is turned into text with a timestamp on each segment.

  3. Step 03

    Review and fix

    Read along with the timestamps and correct names, places and any lines lost to noise, right in the browser.

  4. Step 04

    Export the transcript

    Download a TXT file on the free plan, or SRT, VTT, Word and PDF on a paid plan.

Who uses AVI transcription

Anyone sitting on hours of AVI footage who needs to know what was said without watching it all again.

  • Archivists

    An archivist working through a box of digitised tapes transcribes each AVI file and uses the text and timestamps to write catalogue descriptions without watching every hour.

  • Businesses

    A company with years of training sessions and all-hands recordings saved as AVI turns them into text that staff can search and quote, instead of rewatching.

  • Video Editors

    An editor cutting a documentary from old AVI footage reads the transcript to find the usable soundbites and, on a paid plan, exports SRT captions for the finished cut.

  • Historians

    An oral historian transcribes interviews recorded on camcorders years ago, then checks each quote against the recording before citing it.

What you get with an AVI transcript

  1. Older Codecs Welcome

    Only the audio track is transcribed, so AVI files encoded with DivX, Xvid, Motion JPEG or other older video codecs are handled the same way.

  2. Upload AVI As It Is

    If the file is under 500 MB, upload the AVI directly. There is no need to convert it to MP4 or extract the audio first.

  3. Files up to 500 MB and 6 Hours

    Upload files up to 500 MB and recordings up to 6 hours long on every plan. For bigger AVI files, upload the audio track on its own.

  4. Speaker Identification

    Each speaker is labelled (Speaker 1, Speaker 2) on every plan, which helps with interviews and family recordings where several people talk.

  5. Subtitles for Old Footage

    Export the transcript as SRT or VTT subtitle files on a paid plan and load them into a video player or editor next to the footage. The free plan exports TXT.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Which AVI codecs are supported?
Most of them. AVI is a container, and the video codec inside (DivX, Xvid, Motion JPEG or others) does not matter, because only the audio track is used. The common AVI audio formats, such as MP3 and uncompressed PCM, work. If a file will not process, extract its audio to MP3 or WAV with a converter and upload that file.
Can I transcribe old camcorder recordings?
Yes. Camcorder tapes digitised to AVI, and files copied straight off older digital camcorders, upload like any other video. Only the speech is transcribed, so picture quality does not matter. Clear voices near the camera give the best results, up to 99% accurate; people far from the built-in microphone, wind and background noise lower accuracy, so expect to correct some lines.
What about low quality audio in old AVI files?
It can still be transcribed, but accuracy drops. Hear2Text does not clean up or enhance audio, so hiss, hum, music under speech, distant microphones and people talking over each other all cost accuracy. Clear speech reaches up to 99%. For poor recordings, plan to review the transcript in the browser editor and fix names and unclear passages against the recording.
Is there a file size limit?
Yes. Each upload can be up to 500 MB and up to 6 hours long, on the free and paid plans alike. AVI files often store lightly compressed video, so an hour of footage can pass 500 MB. If yours does, extract the audio track to MP3 or M4A, or re-encode the video to a smaller MP4, then upload that instead.
Should I convert AVI to MP4 first?
No, not if the AVI file is under 500 MB: upload it as it is. Converting only helps when the file is too big. In that case, extracting the audio alone gives the smallest file, since the transcript comes only from the sound. A smaller MP4 re-encode also works. Either way, speech accuracy stays the same at normal audio quality.

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Turn the AVI files on your drive into searchable text

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Transcribe your first AVI file free: 120 minutes every week

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