Temi Transcription Review: Pricing, Accuracy Claims and the Phone App

Type temi.com into a browser today and the first thing you see isn't Temi. It's a full page that says "Like Temi? You'll Love Rev." with a small link underneath: "Not ready to try Rev? Click here to continue using Temi."

That one screen tells you most of what you need to know. Temi transcription is still open for business: the site still lists $0.25 a minute and still promises a machine transcript back in minutes. But the company that owns it is steering people somewhere else, and both phone apps were last updated years ago.

Here's the short answer. If you have an English audio file on your computer and want a quick, cheap draft transcript with no subscription, Temi does that job. If you want a phone app that records a conversation and gives you a transcript and summary, Temi's app isn't the one we'd start with in 2026, and this review shows why.

We haven't run files through Temi, so you won't find a "we tested it" score here. Everything below comes from temi.com, the Temi help center, Rev's page about Temi and the App Store and Google Play listings, all read on November 12, 2026, plus public user reviews on those listings.

We make ParrotNotes, a phone-first note taker, so we have an interest. That's why Temi's facts come from Temi, and why our app sits in one section near the end.

If your recordings are in-person conversations rather than files, you can try ParrotNotes free while you read.

Temi transcription in short

Temi is an automated, English-only transcription service you pay for by the minute. You upload audio or video, a speech engine transcribes it, and you fix the result in a web editor.

Verdict: a simple pay-as-you-go tool for the occasional English file. It's a weak pick if you transcribe more than about two hours a month, need another language, or want a phone app that's still being developed.

What Temi is, and how it relates to Rev

Temi isn't an independent company. Its privacy policy says temi.com is "owned and operated by Rev.com, Inc." Rev's own page puts it this way: "Rev launched Temi in 2017 as an easy option for users who needed a high-quality transcript quickly." Both phone apps list Rev as the developer.

Rev also says the two services share an engine: "Both Rev and Temi are powered by the same automatic speech recognition technology." That's Rev's statement, and it's as far as the companies' pages go, so it's as far as we'll go.

What's changed is the direction of travel. First-time visitors to temi.com get the "You'll Love Rev" page before the homepage. Rev's page explains how to merge a Temi account into a Rev account, and adds a warning worth reading twice: "Upon successfully merging, you will lose access to Temi." It also says "Rev's interactive editing tool offers more features and functionality than Temi's."

Nothing on either site says Temi is closing. Still, the dates tell a story. Temi's terms of service were last revised July 5, 2017, the privacy policy on September 4, 2020, and the help center lists eight articles, last edited in October 2023. If you want the bigger sibling instead, our Rev review covers its plans, human transcription and fine print.

Temi transcription pricing: $0.25 a minute, worked out

Pricing is the simplest part of Temi transcription. The homepage lists "$0.25 per audio minute," with "No subscriptions," "No minimum" and "No additional charges." The help center gives two examples: a 5-minute recording costs $1.25, and a 2-hour video costs $30.

Here's that rate across the recordings people actually have:

Rate from temi.com and the Temi help center, checked November 12, 2026. Totals are our arithmetic.

Three details sit behind the headline price:

• The free trial is one file. "Your first file is free, up to 45 minutes in length." That's worth up to $11.25, one time. Pasting a link instead of uploading only works after that first order.
• There are no refunds. The refund page is two sentences long, and the first is "Temi does not offer refunds."
• You can prepay. Add a balance in Settings, and an optional auto reload adds $20 whenever the balance drops below $10. Temi takes cards and PayPal, with no invoice billing.

When per-minute pricing stops being cheap

Per-minute pricing is great for the person with one file. It gets expensive quietly.

Take Dana, who produces a weekly podcast (she's a composite, not a real person). Each episode runs 40 minutes.

Her first one is free. After that, four episodes a month cost her $40, or $480 a year, for English machine transcripts she still has to correct.

The break-even is easy to find. Rev's pricing page, read the same day, lists an Essentials plan at $29.99 a seat a month with 5,000 AI minutes. At Temi's rate, $29.99 buys you 120 minutes.

So past two hours of audio a month, Temi costs more than its parent's subscription. And Rev's Free plan lists 45 AI minutes every month, where Temi's free trial is 45 minutes once.

The old reputation of Temi as the cheapest option also needs a date on it. A Google Play reviewer wrote in January 2021 that the price had gone "from 10c to 25c." Many older reviews still quote 10 cents. The price on Temi's site today is 25.

Temi transcription accuracy: what the company claims

We can't give you a measured accuracy score, because we didn't measure one. Here's what Temi and Rev say, and each line is a vendor claim.

The homepage is refreshingly blunt. Under the heading "Transcript quality depends on audio quality," it shows two cases:

• Good audio (little background noise, clear speakers, minimal accents): "Result: 90-95% Accuracy."
• Difficult audio (heavy background noise, strong accents): "Result: Mostly Unusable."

Rev's page about Temi uses a lower, single figure: "the 90%-accurate transcripts you already know and love." And the App Store listing skips numbers and calls Temi "built with the world's most accurate speech recognition engine."

So what does 90 to 95% mean in practice? A one-hour interview holds roughly 9,000 words. At 95%, about 450 of them are wrong. At 90%, about 900. That's a usable draft for finding quotes, and a real editing job if you need a clean record. Temi's own footer makes the point for us: "Need 99% accurate human transcription? Use Rev transcription services."

The second case matters more than the first. Few vendors print "Mostly Unusable" on their homepage, and Temi deserves credit for it. If your recordings are made in cars, cafes or plant floors, believe them. For how to clean up a machine draft, see our guide on how to transcribe an interview.

The Temi phone app on iPhone and Android

Yes, Temi still has a phone app, on both stores, as of November 2026. Both are free to download, and both are published by Rev. Whether they're still looked after is another question.

Temi on iPhone

The App Store listing is called "Temi - Recorder & Transcriber." It shows 3.9 stars from 631 ratings. According to the listing, recording is free and unlimited with no ads, and it includes:

• Temi Live: "real-time voice-to-text streaming during recording (completely free)"
• Import from other apps through the share sheet ("Copy to Temi")
• A paid "second pass transcript" in under five minutes, with "higher accuracy, speaker labels, and download/share capability"

Read that last line closely. The live text is free to watch, but the transcript you can download and share is the paid one, at a "low per minute charge." The version history ends at version 2.4, dated May 19, 2020.

Temi on Android

The Google Play listing, "Temi - Record and Transcribe," shows 2.9 stars from 299 reviews and more than 50,000 downloads. It lists free recording with no length limit, then "Order a transcript of your recording (English only)" at "$0.25 / minute," delivered by email. It doesn't mention Temi Live. The listing says "Updated on Apr 28, 2021."

What users report

Public reviews on the Play listing are mixed to poor, and they're old. One from February 2021 says the app shows a transcript and then locks it until you pay. One from January 2021 reports blank transcripts along with the price rise. One from August 2022 says the reviewer paid twice and couldn't download either file.

These are individual reports, not our findings, and Rev replied to at least one of them.

The plain reading: the Temi app is a free voice recorder with a pay-per-minute order button, and neither version has had an update in more than five years. Phone systems have moved on a lot since then. We couldn't confirm how either app behaves on a current iPhone or Android phone, so try it with a throwaway recording before you trust it with an important one. Rev's own newer recorder app is covered in our Rev voice recorder app review.

What Temi's own pages say, side by side

This is the table we couldn't find anywhere else: six sources, read on the same day.

All six read November 12, 2026.

Two things stand out. The accuracy claim shrinks as you move from the app listing to the homepage to Rev's own page. And the first thing Temi's own site shows a new visitor is an invitation to try Rev.

Limits to know before you upload

Every one of these is from Temi's help center:

1. English only. "We do not support other languages (e.g. Spanish or German)."
2. File size. Uploads over 2GB fail. Common audio and video formats are accepted, including MP3, M4A, WAV, MP4 and MOV.
3. No compliance claims. "Temi is not a HIPAA-compliant or court-certified service," and captions aren't guaranteed to meet FCC or ADA rules.
4. Machine only. "Files are transcribed by machines and are never seen by a human." Good for privacy, but nobody checks the output.
5. Transcript, then you're on your own. You get text, timestamps, speaker labels and exports to Word, PDF, SRT and VTT. Temi's pages don't describe summaries or action items.

On security, Temi states TLS 1.2 encryption, an NDA on request, and that files you delete are "permanently removed from our servers."

Who Temi still fits, and who should look elsewhere

Temi fits if you have a clear English recording once in a while, you're at a computer, and you want to pay a few dollars with no plan to cancel later. A student with one 30-minute interview pays $7.50, or nothing if it's their first file. That's hard to beat.

Look elsewhere if any of these is true:

• You transcribe more than about two hours a month. A subscription costs less.
• Your recordings aren't in English.
• Your audio is noisy. Temi itself says the result is "Mostly Unusable."
• You need a summary, next steps or a follow-up email, not a raw transcript.
• You want to record on your phone with an app that's still being updated.

For other pay-as-you-go and subscription options, see our Rev alternatives, the best free transcription apps and, for reporters, transcription software for journalists.

If you record conversations on your phone: ParrotNotes

Temi transcription works on files you upload. ParrotNotes does a different job: it records an in-person conversation on the phone you already carry, then gives you the transcript and a summary. If you came here looking for the Temi app, that second job is probably the one you have.

Luis sells commercial flooring (another composite). His week is eleven site visits, each a 25-minute walk-through with a facilities manager.

On Temi, that's 275 minutes, or $68.75 a week, for raw text he'd still have to read and boil down. What he needs is who said what, the square footage and the next step, before he's back in the truck.

Here's how the two compare on that job, from each company's own pages:

Temi facts from temi.com, its help center and store listings; ParrotNotes facts from parrotnotes.app/pricing. Checked November 12, 2026.

ParrotNotes Free is $0 and includes 100 minutes of recording a month, up to 30 minutes per recording, an AI summary on every recording, 5 AI-powered recordings a month with action items and key points, and 3 audio or video imports a month. Pro is $19.99 a month, or $14.99 a month billed annually, with 3,000 minutes a month, recordings up to 3 hours, every AI feature on every recording, and transcription in 99+ languages. Recording works offline; transcription and summaries need a connection.

Two honest limits. ParrotNotes doesn't capture phone-call audio, so it fits meetings and face-to-face conversations, not calls. And if all you have is one short finished file, our free audio to text tool takes an upload of up to 10 minutes.

One rule applies whichever app you pick: tell people before you record them. Some US states require everyone's consent, and our overview of one-party consent states explains the general rules. This isn't legal advice.

Have a conversation coming up this week? Download ParrotNotes free, record it with everyone's OK, and read the summary before you leave the building.

The verdict of this Temi transcription review

Temi transcription is a tidy, honest, aging product. Its pricing fits on one line: $0.25 a minute, first file free up to 45 minutes, no refunds.

Its accuracy claim is modest and candid: 90 to 95% on good audio, "Mostly Unusable" on bad. It handles English only. And its owner, Rev, now greets Temi visitors with an invitation to switch.

So choose by the job in front of you:

• One clear English file, now and then: Temi still takes orders, and the first one is free.
• More than two hours a month, or human-checked transcripts: read our Rev review first.
• Conversations you record on your phone: get ParrotNotes free and let the summary do the reading for you.