Direct answer — Is Aiko still a free transcription app for Mac? No. Aiko is a paid app: $24 one-time on the US App Store storefront, with no free tier and no in-app purchase. It transcribes audio and video entirely on your Mac using OpenAI’s Whisper, in 100 languages. Version 1.11.0 requires macOS 26 or later. A 14-day TestFlight trial is the only way to test it before buying.
Aiko is one of the best-known on-device transcription apps on the Mac: drop a recording in, get text out, nothing leaves the machine. One detail is worth settling before anything else, though — it is not a free app.
This Aiko review covers what the app actually is in September 2026: a paid Aiko Mac Whisper tool from developer Sindre Sorhus, built on the same open-source engine most of its rivals use. We will look at what it does well, the four things it deliberately refuses to do, and when the Aiko transcription app is simply the wrong shape for the work in front of you.
Is Aiko free?
No. Aiko is a paid app: $24 one-time on the US App Store storefront, read on 18 September 2026. The listing carries a price rather than a Get button, and there are no in-app purchases behind it.
Three details make that price easier to judge:
- It is a Universal Purchase. One payment covers the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro apps. For anyone who records on a phone and writes on a Mac, that is genuinely good value.
- The trial is TestFlight-only. The developer’s page offers “Aiko free for 14 days via TestFlight”, described as “the full app, no limitations”. There is no free tier inside the shipping app.
- The figure is storefront-dependent. The Australian listing shows A$39.00 for the same tier. Check your own storefront rather than trusting any review, including this one.
If you were searching for free Whisper transcription on Mac, this is the fork in the road: Aiko does not answer that query. How a one-time price stacks up against the subscription model is a separate question — we covered how one-time purchases and subscriptions compare across transcription apps in detail.
What does Aiko do well?
It does one thing with unusual discipline: high-quality offline transcription of files you already have, with no account, no upload and no settings maze.
The privacy claim is unambiguous in both official sources. The App Store description states the transcription is “powered by OpenAI’s Whisper running locally on your device” and that “nothing leaves your device”. The developer’s page repeats it: “Aiko transcribes audio directly on your device, ensuring complete privacy.”
What you get for the price:
- 100 audio languages, from Afrikaans to Yoruba, with the caveat printed on the official page that “some languages have worse quality than other”.
- Any format macOS can read — .m4a, .wav, .mp3, .mp4, .mov — with the documented exception of .ogg, which rules out Telegram voice notes without a conversion step.
- Subtitle and data exports: SRT subtitles from the save button, plus JSON and CSV.
- Word replacement, which automatically corrects recurring mistakes such as a misspelled product name.
- Deep Shortcuts integration, including a Finder Quick Action that transcribes a file from the right-click menu.
The app also states its priority openly — “Aiko favors accuracy over speed” — which is an honest trade to publish, and it is reflected in the reception: 4.7 out of 5 from 325 ratings on the US storefront, read on 18 September 2026.
What will Aiko not do?
Four things, all of them documented by the developer rather than discovered in testing. None is a bug; each is a boundary.
- No live transcription. The App Store description says it: “It does not do live transcription while recording.” For a Zoom call, the official advice is to record first and drop the file in afterwards.
- No speaker detection. “It does not currently have speaker detection.” The FAQ explains that diarisation “has to first be implemented in the library the app uses”, so it is upstream of the app.
- No editing, by design. “I don’t plan to support any editing. Export the transcription and edit it in a proper text editor.” Every transcript leaves the app before you can fix a word.
- No built-in batch processing. “Aiko does not yet support batch transcription built-in, but you can achieve it with shortcuts.”
Two practical gates matter as much as the feature list. The current version, 1.11.0, released on 27 June 2026, requires macOS 26 or later — a hard stop on an older Mac. And the app is 1.8 GB, because the speech model ships inside it; the FAQ confirms individual languages cannot be removed to reclaim space.
Which Whisper model does Aiko actually run?
Here the two official sources contradict each other, and the disagreement is worth a paragraph because it is the thing that determines output quality.
The App Store description says the app “uses the Whisper medium or small model on iOS depending on available memory and the large v3 model on macOS”. The developer’s own FAQ says the opposite for the Mac: “The app uses the Whisper large v2 model on macOS.”
The site also explains why, which is what makes it the more credible of the two: “The v3 model is worse than v2 in too many cases. I tried releasing v3, but got a lot of emails about the quality being worse, so I ended up reverting it.” Read the store listing as stale on this point. It is a reminder that on-device apps are only as current as the model bundled inside them.
Aiko vs MacWhisper vs Weesper Transcribe
All three transcribe files locally with a Whisper-family model, so the engine is not the deciding factor. What separates them is what happens to the transcript afterwards.
| Aiko | MacWhisper | Weesper Transcribe | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price model | Paid up front, one-time | Free tier + one-time Pro licence | Free tier + one-time Pro upgrade |
| Free tier | None (14-day TestFlight trial) | Yes | Yes — files up to 15 min, plain text |
| Minimum macOS | 26.0 | Varies by build | 13.0 |
| Transcription languages | 100 | 100+ | 57 |
| Edit in app | ❌ by design | ✅ | ✅ inline, auto-saved |
| Batch a folder | ❌ Shortcuts workaround | ✅ | ✅ built-in queue |
| Transcript history search | ❌ | Partial | ✅ keyword + semantic |
| Export formats | Subtitles, JSON, CSV | Multiple | 9 (TXT, MD, SRT, VTT, DOCX, PDF, HTML, CSV, JSON) |
| Automation | Shortcuts | Shortcuts | Local automation API |
MacWhisper keeps a free tier next to a €64 one-time Pro licence, which makes it the natural comparison for anyone weighing Aiko’s up-front price.
Weesper Transcribe sits in a different place again: free to download, with the full model quality available before you pay, and a one-time Pro upgrade that unlocks unlimited file length, batch processing, the nine export formats, inline editing and search. It needs only macOS 13, and it never asks for microphone, Accessibility or screen-recording permission, because it reads files you hand it and nothing else.
The features Aiko omits are, almost exactly, the ones that matter once transcription stops being a one-off. You can queue a folder of recordings as a single job rather than assembling a Shortcut, export SRT and VTT subtitles offline for a video editor, and later find a passage by meaning rather than by exact keyword across everything you have ever transcribed.
Who should buy Aiko, and who should not
Aiko is a good buy if you transcribe occasionally, value a small and opinionated app, work across an iPhone and a Mac on one purchase, need an unusual language among its 100, and are happy to edit elsewhere afterwards. On a current Mac it is a clean, private, well-reviewed tool with no subscription attached.
Look elsewhere if any of these describe you:
- You are on macOS 15 or older — version 1.11.0 will not install.
- You have a backlog, not a file. Batch belongs in the app, not in a Shortcut you maintain.
- You need subtitles plus documents. Aiko exports subtitles, JSON and CSV; DOCX and PDF are not on the list.
- You will search these transcripts later. There is no history search to come back to.
- You wanted free. whisper.cpp, MacWhisper’s free tier and Weesper Transcribe’s free tier are where to look instead.
Frequently asked questions
Is Aiko free?
No. Aiko is a paid app: $24 one-time on the US App Store storefront, read on 18 September 2026, with no free tier and no in-app purchase. As a Universal Purchase, that single payment also covers the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro versions. The only way to try it first is the developer’s 14-day TestFlight trial, described as “the full app, no limitations”. Prices vary by storefront — the Australian listing shows A$39.00 — so check your own.
Does Aiko work offline?
Yes, completely. The App Store description states transcription is “powered by OpenAI’s Whisper running locally on your device” and that “nothing leaves your device”, and the developer’s page repeats the claim. That is why the app is 1.8 GB: the speech model ships inside it rather than living on a server. For sensitive recordings, that is the difference between a private file and an upload.
Which Whisper model does Aiko use on a Mac?
The two official sources disagree. The App Store description says “the large v3 model on macOS”; the developer’s FAQ says “The app uses the Whisper large v2 model on macOS” and explains the reversal: “The v3 model is worse than v2 in too many cases. I tried releasing v3, but got a lot of emails about the quality being worse, so I ended up reverting it.” Treat large v2 as the Mac engine.
Can Aiko transcribe a folder of files at once?
Not on its own. The developer’s page states that Aiko “does not yet support batch transcription built-in, but you can achieve it with shortcuts”. The documented workaround is a Shortcut you invoke from the share sheet or as a Finder Quick Action. It works, but it is a workflow you assemble and maintain rather than a queue the app owns.
Can you edit a transcript inside Aiko?
No, and it is deliberate: “I don’t plan to support any editing. Export the transcription and edit it in a proper text editor.” A word-replacement feature fixes recurring mistakes automatically, which helps with names and jargon, but it is not inline editing. Every transcript leaves the app before a single word can be corrected.
What is the best free Whisper transcription app for Mac in 2026?
Not Aiko: it is a paid app. Three routes do answer it — whisper.cpp, which is free, open source and the engine Aiko itself credits, at the cost of installing and driving it yourself; MacWhisper’s free tier; and Weesper Transcribe, free to download and transcribing files up to 15 minutes at full model quality, with a one-time Pro upgrade for longer files, batch processing and the nine export formats.
Conclusion
Aiko is a well-made app with a clear philosophy: transcribe accurately on-device, then get out of the way. Its refusals are documented up front, which is rarer than it should be.
The catch is that the philosophy stops at the transcript. No editing, no queue, no history search — everything after the first file happens somewhere else. Add the macOS 26 requirement, and the audience narrows to recent Macs and occasional jobs.
If that is your shape, it is a fair one-time purchase. If recordings arrive weekly, in folders, and need to come back out as subtitles and documents you can find again in March, the tool has to own more of the workflow than Aiko intends to.
Working with files you already have? See how batch processing, exports and transcript search fit together in Weesper Transcribe — free to download, one-time Pro upgrade, no subscription. Setup questions are answered in the support documentation.