I have sensitive interviews with audio and video. I don't want to send them to a service to transcribe. What is a good option to accurately transcribe them locally on my computer?
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A good tool that runs locally is OpenAI's Whisper. It provides very good quality transcripts fairly quickly. Installation and use depends on your operating system and which version you install.
Important Note: The Whisper API, where audio is sent to OpenAI to be processed by them and then sent back (usually through a programming language like Python) is NOT appropriate for sensitive data. The model should be downloaded with tools such as those described in the rest of this FAQ, so that audio is kept to your local machine.
Whisper
Windows
aTrain is an app created by the University of Graz that not only uses Whisper to transcribe, but also distinguishes different speakers. It can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store or downloaded and installed directly from aTrain's Download Page (MSIX format recommended).
You can choose the file you want to transcribe, the size of model (smaller is faster but not as accurate), and also tell the app whether there are multiple speakers (specifying the number improves accuracy). If you have an NVIDIA graphics card (GPU), you can greatly speed up transcription time by noting that in the Advanced Settings.
MacOS
There are many options to use Whisper for the Mac.
One of the easiest to use is Aiko which can be installed from the App Store. You can then just drag-and-drop audio onto the app and it will transcribe it, and you can choose to download in different formats, including those with timestamps. By default, it auto-detects the language and transcribes in that language, but you can also set it to translate to English. You will likely need at least 16 GB of RAM to use this (though some users report that it works on less).
Other Options
Adobe Premiere Pro Speech to Text
You can also use Adobe Premiere Pro Speech to Text to generate captions for video and audio. To make sure it is only transcribing on your own device, make sure you have version 22.2 or later. As a Harvard affiliate, you have free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud, including Premiere Pro.