Convert video to text

In an account — free or Pro, with the same features — the transcript comes with:

Who spoke

In American English, British English and Indian English, the transcript separates the voices into Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on; you rename each label once, and the name holds for the whole transcript. In Australian English and Philippine English, it separates them too, on recordings of up to 2 hours. If the separation fails, the transcript comes without speaker labels, and says so.

A time on every word

Click any line to play that passage; the transcript follows the recording while it plays.

Subtitles or a document

Word (DOCX), TXT, SRT and VTT, on every plan. SRT and VTT are subtitle files; Word and TXT are the text itself.

Captions in the picture

Burn the captions into the video and download the finished file. Burning captions into a video works on every plan, Free included, for recordings up to your plan's file length and 2 hours at most; each month an account can make 20 such videos, 600 minutes of video in all, and a finished video is kept for 7 days.

Summary, translation and questions

Summarise the video in the shape that fits it, translate the transcript, and ask what was said about a topic; the answer points to the moment in the recording.

Only the sound is used. Text on slides, captions already in the picture and anything typed in a chat are not read, and a speaker who is off-microphone comes back as fragments. A video file is large for the speech it holds, so it takes longer to upload than the audio alone would; the transcript is the same either way.

Every automatic transcript has errors, and they cluster on proper names, numbers and technical terms. Before you quote a passage, click the line and listen: with a time on every word, that check takes seconds. In a video that is often the names of products, places and people shown on screen but misheard in speech: fix them in the text before you export the subtitles, and every cue carries the fix.

Without an account, the trial transcribes up to the first 10 minutes of a recording. On Pro, each file can be up to 8 hours, within the month's included hours; what each plan includes, the pricing page shows. See plans and prices.

On long recordings, speaker labels can wander from one section to the next — a consequence of how long audio is processed, not a setting.

Name the main language rather than leaving it on automatic. Automatic detection has to decide what language each stretch of speech is in, and where a recording switches language, what was said in the other one may come back translated instead of transcribed — or not come back at all. Either way nothing is marked as missing: the transcript will look complete.

Philippine English is marked “preview” in the language list: offered, but without a quality commitment yet, so check its transcript more closely before you use it.