Transcribe Japanese audio to text, free

What makes Japanese hard to transcribe

Japanese mixes three writing systems in the same sentence and uses no spaces, so accuracy is scored by character error rate. The hard part is deciding which script a word belongs in: the same spoken word can correctly appear as kanji, hiragana or katakana depending on register, and picking wrong reads as an error even when the sound was heard perfectly.

What your Japanese transcript looks like

You get natural mixed-script text with Japanese punctuation (、 and 。). Loanwords land in katakana as a Japanese writer would type them.

[00:00 → 00:04] 皆さん、おはようございます。本日の会議を始めます。

[00:04 → 00:08] まず先月の結果についてご説明します。

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

How accurate to expect

Formal and business Japanese transcribes reliably. The weak points are casual speech with dropped particles, and any recording where the correct kanji for a name cannot be inferred from context.

What usually needs fixing

1. 1 Personal and company names — the same reading maps to many possible kanji, and only you know which one is correct.
2. 2 Script register, where a word that should be katakana comes out in hiragana or kanji.
3. 3 Sentence boundaries in long spoken paragraphs, since Japanese speech often runs on without clear stops.

Getting better results

• → Names of people and companies are the weakest point — kanji choice for a surname is often ambiguous from sound alone.
• → Keigo-heavy business Japanese transcribes reliably; casual speech with dropped particles is harder.

Who transcribes Japanese