Transcribe Russian audio to text, free

What makes Russian hard to transcribe

Russian marks grammatical role through case endings, and unstressed vowels reduce heavily in speech — the o in 'молоко' is pronounced closer to a. That means the correct ending frequently cannot be heard and must be reconstructed from the sentence, so errors show up as wrong endings rather than wrong words.

What your Russian transcript looks like

Cyrillic with standard punctuation. The letter ё is normally written as е, matching ordinary Russian text.

[00:00 → 00:04] Здравствуйте все, начинаем нашу встречу.

[00:04 → 00:08] Сначала обсудим результаты прошлого месяца.

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

How accurate to expect

Broadcast, lecture and podcast Russian transcribes well. The characteristic error is a wrong grammatical ending rather than a wrong word, which keeps transcripts readable even when imperfect.

What usually needs fixing

1. 1 Case endings on nouns and adjectives, reduced to near-identical vowels in unstressed positions.
2. 2 Foreign names, which Russian declines and which therefore appear in an inflected form.
3. 3 Perfective and imperfective verb pairs that differ by a prefix barely audible in fast speech.

Getting better results

• → Check case endings on names and technical terms; the stem is usually right even when the ending is not.
• → Ukrainian-accented Russian is recognised but is a distinct language — select Ukrainian if that is what was spoken.

Who transcribes Russian