Skip to main content

Transcribe

Transcribe, translate,
summarize — locally.

Kajo Voice transcribes interviews, lectures, meetings, and field recordings on your Mac, Windows, or Linux machine — your audio never uploads.

Lifetime — $49 one-time
Kajo Voice importing and transcribing a recording on-device
Drop in audio or video — transcription runs locally.

Replace the stack. Pay once.

Most people pay a cloud transcriber for the recordings they already have, then a cloud notebook to keep and query them — every month, forever — and still cannot keep any of it private. Kajo bundles transcription, a searchable library, and cited chat for a single $49 payment — on Mac, Windows, and Linux, with nothing leaving your machine.

Tool Listed /mo
TurboScribe Unlimited — cloud file transcription, billed monthly $20.00
Otter.ai Pro — cloud meeting notebook with AI chat, billed monthly $16.99
Typical stack total, every month ~$36.99
Kajo (transcribe + library + chat) $49 once

List prices read from each vendor's pricing page on 2026-09-09. Your stack may differ — the point is that a recurring cloud stack bills every month, while Kajo is a single $49 payment that unlocks unlimited imports and Lifetime convenience (watch folders, batch export), on-device. At ~$36.99/mo, the stack passes Kajo's one-time price in about 2 months — then keeps charging.

What you get

Any file, any source

Audio and video files — MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4 and other common containers — plus whole folders. Lifetime adds watch folders. Everything is decoded and transcribed on your machine.

On-device transcription

Whisper large-v3 turbo — 98 languages, on-device via whisper.cpp.

Speakers, labelled automatically

After transcription Kajo detects who spoke when, on-device. Rename the roster, reassign a turn, or restore the automatic labels — every summary, chat answer, and export uses the names.

Translate + summarize locally

One on-device Gemma 4 model translates the transcript and writes summaries — entirely on-device, with no cloud round-trip.

Export every format

TXT, Markdown, DOCX, SRT, VTT, JSON, CSV, PDF, and QDPX for editors, captions, and CAQDAS tools.

Three reasons Kajo exists

  1. Local-first / private by default

    Your audio never leaves your laptop.

    Audio is transcribed on-device — there is no cloud-processing path. Private by architecture.

  2. Cross-platform, including Linux

    Mac, Windows, and Linux — one product, three operating systems.

    Native installers for all three. Linux is a first-class target, not a port — the only local audio knowledge base that takes it seriously.

  3. Cited chat

    Ask questions across your archive — get cited answers.

    Chat with your entire library using a local model. Every answer links back to the exact moment in the recording — no copy/paste.

Frequently asked questions

Does Kajo upload my audio to transcribe?

No. Transcription runs on-device. Translation, summaries, and chat run on-device too — Kajo never uploads your audio or transcript text.

Is there a per-minute fee?

No. You pay once and your machine does the compute. Free covers 5 files or 150 minutes of audio — total, for life. A single $49 purchase removes the caps; your installed version keeps working forever.

How does Kajo compare to MacWhisper or Superwhisper?

Great local transcription — then it is just a text file. Kajo turns every transcription into a searchable, chat-able archive you query in-app with cited answers, on Mac, Windows, and Linux.