Make your recordings searchable.
To you. To no one else.
Most transcription services live in U.S. clouds. Your meetings, voice memos, podcasts — some of the most sensitive content you create — pass through Otter, Rev, or Descript, all reachable under the U.S. CLOUD Act. SoTranscribe is the practical alternative.
Open source under the EvoBioSys License. No credit card. No tracking.
Why this exists
Your audio is yours. The leverage shouldn’t be theirs.
When you upload audio to a cloud transcription service, you’re trusting a long chain of companies with what was said in your meeting, your therapy session, your interview, or your private voice note. The audio gets copied, stored, processed, and sometimes used to train someone else’s product.
Most of the popular tools are American companies. A US court can request your data even when it’s “stored in Europe.” There is a friendlier way to do this — and we’re building it.
Jurisdiction matters
Austria and Switzerland — you pick.
We colocate our hosting hardware in named facilities in Austria and Switzerland. Both jurisdictions are outside the reach of the U.S. CLOUD Act.
Austria
EU member · GDPR · targeted-disclosure regime
- Providers can only be compelled to release data on a targeted, judicially-warranted basis — never as part of a dragnet
- Stronger than Switzerland on this specific point
- EU Single Market — frictionless billing for EU customers
- Vienna data centre infrastructure (Anexia, EDIS)
Switzerland
Non-EU · Swiss DSG · CLOUD Act foreign
- Outside both EU and U.S. legal orbits
- Strong constitutional privacy protections
- Long history of data-sovereignty enforcement
- For users who want maximum jurisdictional distance from the U.S.
We’re not puritans. You don’t have to self-host. You don’t have to give up the convenience. You just stop bleeding meeting audio into someone else’s ad system.
What we promise
Three things, in plain language.
Your audio stays where you put it.
Run it on your own computer (free) and nothing leaves the room. Use our hosted tier and audio sits on European servers we own, never shared with anyone.
No US company touches your data.
We don’t use Stripe, Google Analytics, or American clouds. Mollie (NL) for payments, Bunny Fonts (SI), Plausible (EU) if we ever add analytics. So a US court can’t reach in.
You can leave any time.
Your transcripts are yours, in standard formats. Cancel and you take everything with you. The source code is open, so the door always opens outward.
How it works
Three steps. One result.
-
A
Drop in your recordings.
Voice memos, meetings, podcast episodes, wearable captures — whatever you have. Or set a folder to auto-import as new ones land.
-
B
We transcribe and tell speakers apart.
Each conversation becomes a clean text document with timestamps and who-said-what. Whisper Large v3 + pyannote diarization. No human listens. No third-party service involved.
-
C
Search like you search email.
Press ⌘F — or open the app — and find every moment where you said the word you’re looking for. Across years of conversations.
What people use it for
Some of the things it’s good at.
Pricing
Pick what feels right.
We’re still figuring out the right shape. Here’s what works today, in the open.
Self-host
Free
Run it on your own computer. Source open under the EvoBioSys License. Bring your own GPU. Community support by mail.
Get the code →Most frictionless
Beta access
Pricing TBD
We host it for you on Austrian or Swiss servers. You upload, we transcribe, you download. Beta users get early features and a direct line to us.
Join the waitlist →For organisations
Custom
Larger volume, custom integration, customer support, signed agreement — we’ll work it out together.
Contact us →Who’s behind it
Built by SoTranscribe GmbH (in Gründung).
SoTranscribe is the first product spun out of idea2.life, an incubator within the EvoBioSys network. Co-founded by Katherine Colquitt (Projektleiterin, ex-Edelman Smithfield) and Jakob Possert (Technical Co-Lead). Vienna-based, EU/CH-jurisdiction by design.
Common questions
Plain answers.
- Does anyone listen to my recordings?
- No. The whole point is that nobody hears the audio except whoever you choose to share it with. The transcription is done by software, on hardware that’s either yours or ours — never on a service that re-uses your data.
- How accurate is it?
- Very. It uses the same family of speech-recognition models that the major services use, just running it without sending the audio elsewhere. For most clean recordings, accuracy is comparable to what you’d get from a paid cloud transcription service.
- Why Austria specifically, not just Switzerland?
- Austria has a targeted-disclosure regime: providers can only be compelled to release data on a judicially-warranted, individual basis — never as part of a dragnet. That’s a stronger protection than Switzerland on this specific point. We host both, so you can pick the jurisdiction that fits your threat model.
- What about privacy laws?
- We’re built around GDPR. We don’t use any US-based company in the data path — not for payments, not for analytics, not for fonts. That’s a deliberate choice, not just a feature bullet.
- What languages does it support?
- About 100, with the strongest results in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and the other major European languages. Detection is automatic.
- Do I need to be technical to use it?
- For the hosted version, no — upload an audio file, get text back. For self-host, yes — you’ll need to be comfortable running things on your own machine. The hosted version exists for everyone who’d rather just have it work.
- Can I export my transcripts?
- Always. Standard formats (Markdown + JSON). No lock-in. If you ever leave, you take everything.
Want the technical write-up? CLOUD Act reasoning, named providers, the full pipeline diagram, hardware research, lineage and ethos —
Talk to us
Mail is the front door.
- Mail — connect@sotranscribe.com (we read everything)
- Source — github.com/evobiosys/sotranscribe
- Matrix & Mastodon — coming soon