Exporting

--out writes the transcript to a file; --format picks the shape:

--format	Output
plain (default)	header comments + timestamped lines
vtt	WebVTT, with speaker cues
json	{"language", "text", "segments":[{start,end,speaker,text}]}

transcribe jfk.wav --model whisper-tiny --out jfk.vtt --format vtt

WEBVTT
NOTE source: /audio/jfk.wav
NOTE audio 00:00:11 model whisper/whisper-tiny lang en diarize on window 300s generated 2026-01-01 09:00:00

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.500
<v Speaker 0>And so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.</v>

NOTE done 2026-01-01 09:00:00

Real output, with the input path and timestamps replaced by placeholders. The NOTE source line records the absolute path of the input file, as does the # source header of the plain format.

JSON

--format json writes the language, the full text and the segments, with times in seconds:

{
  "language": "en",
  "text": "And so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.",
  "segments": [
    {"start":0,"end":10.5,"speaker":0,"text":"And so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."}
  ]
}

Line endings in the exported file are \n on every platform — TranscriptWriter does not go through TextWriter.WriteLine, which would emit \r\n on Windows — so a transcript exported on Windows diffs cleanly against one exported on Linux.

Speaker attribution in the output

With a diarization model, the attribution appears per format as Speaker N:, <v Speaker N> or "speaker":N. Which models can do it, and what you get on one that cannot, is on Long audio and speaker diarization.