Loom → Text · Local · Free
Transcribe a Loom video to text — locally, on your Mac
Paste a Loom share link into MacParakeet and get a full, timestamped transcript in seconds. It runs on your Mac — so there's no upload, no signup, and no length cap on free. The things async teams actually hit.
https://www.loom.com/share/… macOS 14.2+ · Apple Silicon · Free & open-source · no account
Why transcribe a Loom video?
Loom replaced a lot of meetings — but a 12-minute walkthrough is the opposite of skimmable. You can't search it, paste a line of it into a ticket, or hand it to a teammate who has four minutes. A transcript fixes that: the recording becomes notes, a spec, a changelog entry, or a summary you can actually act on.
That's why people reach for this:
- Product & design — turn a recorded walkthrough into a written spec or a set of tickets.
- Support & success — turn a bug repro or a customer Loom into searchable text and a clear summary.
- Engineering — capture an async design review as a doc instead of asking everyone to re-watch.
The catch with most "Loom to text" web tools is that they upload your video to their servers and cap the free tier at a few minutes — a problem when the recording is an internal product walkthrough. MacParakeet keeps the whole thing on your Mac, with no cap, so the sensitive walkthrough and the 50-minute onboarding recording are both fine.
How to transcribe Loom videos on your Mac
Free, local, and no upload to a transcription cloud. The whole thing takes about a minute the first time, seconds after that.
- 1
Copy the Loom share link
In Loom, hit Share and copy the link — it looks like
loom.com/share/…. Public and unlisted share links work, because the audio is reachable. Videos locked to a workspace login or a password generally can't be downloaded. - 2
Paste it into MacParakeet
Open the Transcribe tab, paste the link, and hit Transcribe. MacParakeet downloads the audio (Loom serves
.webm; the bundled FFmpeg handles it) and transcribes it locally on the Neural Engine. - 3
Copy, export, or summarize
Get TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, or JSON — with timestamps and speaker labels. Drop it into a doc, or hand it to your own LLM for action items and a summary. The text is yours to keep.
Prefer the terminal? One command does the download and the transcription:
$ macparakeet-cli transcribe "https://www.loom.com/share/<id>" --format text
Install with brew install moona3k/tap/macparakeet-cli. Add more links and --output-dir to batch a whole list in one walk-away run. See the agent & CLI guide →
What "local" means here — honestly
To fetch a Loom link, MacParakeet downloads the audio from the source over the network — that step needs an internet connection. Everything after that is on-device: the speech recognition runs on your Mac's Apple Neural Engine via the Parakeet model, at roughly 155× realtime with a ~2.5% word error rate on English. Your audio is never uploaded to a transcription server, there's no account, and there are no per-minute caps.
Transcribe content you own or have the right to use, and respect each platform's terms of service. MacParakeet is a tool for getting text out of media you're allowed to access — not for redistributing other people's videos.
Frequently asked
Does this work for private or workspace-only Loom videos?
Public and unlisted share links work because the audio is reachable. Videos locked to a workspace login or protected by a password generally can't be downloaded — open the video in Loom and use a share link you're allowed to access.
Is there a length limit?
No. Many web tools cap free transcription at 3 to 10 minutes; MacParakeet has no cap because it runs on your Mac. A 45-minute walkthrough takes the same path as a 2-minute one — just a few more seconds of compute.
How is this different from Loom's built-in transcript?
Loom shows a transcript inside its own player on supported plans. MacParakeet gives you a portable file — TXT, Markdown, SRT, JSON, and more — that you own, can search, and can feed into other tools, without sending the video to anyone.
Do I need a Loom account?
No. You need a share link you're allowed to view. There's no MacParakeet account either — no signup, no email, no credit card.
Get the transcript in a minute.
Free and open-source. Download MacParakeet, paste your Loom link, and keep the text.
macOS 14.2+ · Apple Silicon · GPL-3.0