Albanian transcription: an honest picture
Albanian has little speech training data compared with major European languages. The result is a rough draft that needs a full review. Expect corrections throughout, and check every name, place and specialist term.
Clear audio from one speaker near the microphone gives the most usable draft: a lecture, a news-style interview, a dictated note or a sermon. Phone calls, weddings, family gatherings and people talking at once give much weaker text. There the timestamps mainly help you find your place while you type.
Reviewing is still faster than typing from nothing. Play the file, follow the highlighted line, click a line to hear it again and fix it in place. Have important text checked by an Albanian speaker.
Speed matters as much as dialect. Fast, emotional speech at family events or on the phone tends to lose word endings and run words together, while slower speech in interviews and lectures holds up much better. If you have a choice of recordings, start with the clearest one to judge how much editing to expect.
Gheg, Tosk and standard Albanian
Albanian has two main dialect groups. Tosk is spoken in southern Albania and is the basis of the standard written language. Gheg is spoken in northern Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia, and differs in vowels, nasal sounds and some verb forms.
The model writes in standard Albanian, so Tosk speech is usually closer to the result. Gheg speakers from Kosovo or Shkodër will see words normalized toward the standard or misheard, and infinitive forms like me punu may be changed. If you need the transcript to keep Gheg forms, plan to correct those passages by hand.
Albanian letters and spelling to check
The transcript uses the Albanian Latin alphabet. These are the common fixes.
- Ë is often dropped or written as e, especially at the end of words where it is barely pronounced.
- Ç may become c, and the digraphs dh, th, xh, sh and zh can be confused.
- Rr and r, and ll and l, are separate letters and are easy to mix up.
- Foreign names may be written as pronounced in Albanian (Xhorxh) or in the original spelling.
- Numbers may be written as digits or words, and the definite article endings on dates and names need a look.
- Capitalization of nationalities and languages follows Albanian rules (shqiptar, anglisht in lower case), and the model may capitalize them as in English.
Mixing, auto-detect and who uploads
Albanian is not closely related to the languages around it, but auto-detect can still misjudge short clips, clips that open in English, and speech mixed with Italian, Greek, German or Serbian. This page preselects Albanian. If the transcript comes back in the wrong language, check the setting and run the file again. If a recording is mostly in another language, choose that one.
A large share of uploads come from the diaspora in Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the US: family voice notes, wedding videos, calls with relatives and grandparents telling family history. Younger speakers abroad mix in many words from the local language, which will often be misheard. Other common files are university lectures, interviews, podcasts and YouTube videos that need Albanian subtitles.
Uploading and next steps
WhatsApp voice notes, phone recordings and MP4 or MOV videos upload as they are. You can also record in the browser or import a YouTube or TikTok link. Exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV keep ë and ç.
To read the content in English, use the Google Translate link on the transcript or the AI prompt export with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Speaker labels are on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. Your files are never used to train AI models.