Every week this desk turns audio into text: voice notes from a walk, meeting recordings that would otherwise evaporate, interviews that need a searchable transcript. That weekly habit is the test everything below has to survive — a real workflow, not a synthetic benchmark. Free AI transcription in 2026 has grown up: Whisper-family models run locally on an ordinary laptop, and the free cloud tiers are real quotas rather than trials in costume. The catch is that "free" hides three different produc...