Transcribe French audio to text, free

What makes French hard to transcribe

French writes far more letters than it pronounces. Plural endings, most final consonants and many verb endings are silent, so the sound alone cannot tell you whether to write 'parle', 'parles' or 'parlent'. Liaison then glues words together across boundaries, which makes segmentation harder than the clean spelling suggests.

What your French transcript looks like

Accents, cedillas and ligatures (œ) are written properly, and French spacing rules before : ; ? ! are applied.

[00:00 → 00:04] Bonjour à tous, nous allons commencer la réunion.

[00:04 → 00:08] D'abord, revenons sur les résultats du mois dernier.

An illustration of how French transcripts are formatted — script, punctuation and timestamps. Not the output of any particular recording.

How accurate to expect

Reliable across metropolitan, Belgian, Swiss, Canadian and West African French. Grammar agreement rather than sound recognition is the main source of remaining errors.

What usually needs fixing

1. 1 Silent plural and verb endings, which cannot be heard and must be inferred from context.
2. 2 Homophone families like a / à and ou / où, which are frequent and change meaning.
3. 3 Liaison across word boundaries, which occasionally shifts where one word is judged to end.

Getting better results

• → Agreement errors are the most common correction needed — they are grammar, not hearing, mistakes.
• → Quebec French is recognised, with vocabulary differences preserved rather than converted to metropolitan French.

Who transcribes French