How Arabic speech transcribes
Transcription works best on Modern Standard Arabic — lectures, news, formal talks. Strong regional dialects and code-switching with French or English are recognised less reliably, so review those passages.
What a Arabic transcript looks like
Arabic transcripts are written right to left without short-vowel marks, as in everyday writing. Dialect words may be spelled in different ways, because dialects have no fixed spelling — keep that in mind when searching a transcript.
Examples
A researcher transcribes a 50-minute Arabic panel discussion recorded at a conference so it can be quoted in a paper.
A journalist converts a 20-minute Arabic voice interview into text before translating the key quotes.
Costs: 50 credits (5¢) and 20 credits (2¢), including a translated transcript if you select another language. Audio files go in the audio to text workspace.
Standard Arabic, dialect, and the mix in between
Very little real-world Arabic is pure Modern Standard Arabic or pure dialect. A news anchor reads in MSA, then interviews a shopkeeper in Egyptian Arabic; a professor lectures in MSA and jokes in Levantine. Check how your transcript handles these shifts: dialect words may be written in a dialect spelling, nudged toward an MSA equivalent, or misheard as a similar-sounding MSA word. For quotes, keep what was said; for a report written in MSA, you may standardise. Mark the dialect stretches using the timestamped transcript so a reviewer can go straight to them. Multilingual speech recognition explains why quality varies within a language as well as between languages.
Hamza, taa marbuta and alif maqsura
Everyday Arabic writing is inconsistent with a few letters, and transcripts reflect that habit. When searching, try each variant or use a search tool that normalises Arabic letters; before publishing, choose the standard forms and apply them everywhere.
- أ / إ / ا
- Hamza on alif may be written or left off: أحمد or احمد
- ة / ه
- Taa marbuta is often written as haa in informal text: مدرسة or مدرسه
- ى / ي
- Alif maqsura and yaa get swapped: على (on) versus علي (Ali, a name)
- ٣ / 3
- Eastern Arabic or Western digits; audiences differ by region, so pick one
Right-to-left cues with Latin words and digits
Arabic subtitles run right to left, but brand names, URLs, English terms and numbers run left to right inside them. Players lay out mixed text using the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, and a cue that starts or ends with a Latin word or a number can display with punctuation at the wrong end or words in an unexpected order. Test the SRT or VTT in the player your audience uses before publishing. Common fixes are rephrasing so the cue begins with an Arabic word, or inserting a right-to-left mark. Right-to-left video localization covers player support in depth.
French and English inside Arabic speech
Maghrebi speakers mix French freely, from ça va to whole clauses, and many Gulf and Levantine professionals mix English. Check whether those words come out in Latin letters, in Arabic letters, or as misheard Arabic. Darija is far from MSA and is the hardest case, so test a short clip before committing a long file. Arabizi, Arabic typed in Latin letters with digits such as 3 for ع and 7 for ح, is common in chat but isn't what the transcript produces; if your audience writes that way, transliteration is a separate step.
Names, Quranic verses and quoted poetry
Arabic names reach English in many spellings (Mohammed, Muhammad, Mohamed; Abdelrahman, Abd al-Rahman), and English or French names reach Arabic letters in more than one way too. If you pick a target language, check every name in the translation against the person's own spelling, not the most common one. Speakers in lectures, speeches and talk shows also quote the Quran, hadith or classical poetry. The transcript writes these without vowel marks and may slip on archaic words, so compare any quoted verse with an authoritative text before publishing, and paste the exact wording from that source rather than correcting the machine draft letter by letter.
Costing a 110-minute televised debate
A recorded TV debate runs 110 minutes and costs 110 credits (11¢) as a transcript. A research team needs English for co-authors, so it runs the file again with English as the target for another 110 credits (11¢). The team marks the dialect-heavy call-in segments by timestamp and has an Egyptian colleague review only those, then checks that every figure in the SRT displays in the right order.
For one-on-one recordings, the interview transcription page covers the review and quoting steps.
Using the tool on this page
- The spoken language is detected automatically; you select the output language — the spoken language itself for an untranslated transcript, or another language for a translation. Files can be up to 2 hours long.
- Only the audio is sent for processing — the video stays on your device — and audio and text are deleted within 30 minutes of delivery (how files are protected).
- You can download a timestamped transcript, subtitles (SRT and VTT) and plain text. Every output, step and limit is explained on the video to text page.
Other languages
Frequently asked questions
Can it transcribe Egyptian or Gulf Arabic?
It can, but accuracy is highest for Modern Standard Arabic. Dialect-heavy speech is transcribed less reliably, so plan to review those parts.
Can it transcribe Maghrebi Darija?
Expect more errors than with Egyptian or Levantine speech, because Darija is further from Standard Arabic and mixes in French and Amazigh words. Run a few minutes first and judge whether the result is a usable draft for your purpose.
Is right-to-left order kept in the SRT file?
SRT and VTT store characters in reading order; how a line is displayed is up to the player. If punctuation or numbers look misplaced, the file is usually fine and the player's handling of mixed-direction text is the issue.
Which punctuation marks will an Arabic transcript use?
Check your file for the Arabic comma (،) and question mark (؟) versus their Latin forms. Arabic readers expect the Arabic marks, and mixing the two looks careless in subtitles, so replace any Latin commas and question marks in one pass.
Can I keep the Arabic text and get an English translation too?
Picking English as the target shows Arabic and English side by side on the result screen, but the subtitles and plain transcript you download are English. For Arabic files as well, run the video once more with Arabic selected, which returns the text untranslated.