Amharic audio to text: what to expect
The speech model has seen little Amharic compared with English or French, so treat the result as a rough draft. It is most useful on slow, clear speech from one person close to the microphone. A noisy phone call, a wedding video with music or a group talking over each other will need many corrections, and names of people and places are the most common errors.
Even a rough draft is usually faster to fix than typing fidel from scratch.
Upload the recording as it is: MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG, OPUS, FLAC, a voice message or a phone recording. You can also record from your microphone in the upload box. Nothing needs converting first.
The transcript opens next to a player that highlights the current line. Click a line to hear it again, correct the word in place, and your changes save automatically.
Fidel spelling in the transcript
The transcript is written in the Ge'ez syllabary, where each character stands for a consonant plus a vowel. Several characters sound the same in modern Amharic, and the model cannot hear which one a writer would choose:
- ሀ, ሐ and ኀ are all pronounced h, so a word may appear with a different h-letter from the one in a dictionary.
- ሰ and ሠ are both s, አ and ዐ are both a glottal vowel, and ጸ and ፀ are both ts'.
- Gemination (doubled consonants) is not marked in fidel, so words that differ only by length can be confused.
- Ethiopic punctuation such as ። and ፣ may be missing or replaced by Latin punctuation.
English, Tigrinya and Oromo in the same recording
Amharic speech in Addis Ababa and in the diaspora often borrows English words, especially for technology, business and school subjects. Those words may be written in fidel as they sound, or in Latin letters. Keep Amharic selected when most of the recording is Amharic; auto-detect can misjudge a file that opens with an English greeting.
Tigrinya and Afaan Oromo are not in the language list. A recording that switches into either of them will come out as garbled Amharic for those passages, so mark them during review.
What people transcribe in Amharic
Common uploads are voice messages from family in Ethiopia, interviews for research on Ethiopian communities in the US, Europe and Israel, Orthodox Tewahedo sermons and Bible teaching, church and community meetings, and radio-style talk shows. Students also bring recorded lectures and oral-history interviews with elders.
Export TXT, DOCX, PDF, CSV, SRT or VTT, with timestamps and speaker names switched on or off per export. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack.
For video files such as YouTube interviews or recorded services, see the Amharic video to text page.