Uploading Estonian video
Drop in the video file without converting it: MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, AVI, 3GP or a screen recording from your phone. The sound is pulled out on our server, and every timestamp points to the same moment in the original video. If the video is online, use Import from link: public YouTube, TikTok and Vimeo videos, Dropbox and Google Drive share links and direct file links all work. Only the audio is fetched, one video per link, and several links can wait in the queue.
The transcript then opens beside the player with the current line highlighted, so checking it is a matter of listening and typing.
Long words, vowel length and Russian
Estonian has long compound words and three degrees of length in vowels and consonants, and a single or doubled letter can change the meaning of a word. In practice the draft sometimes doubles or drops a letter or splits a compound; read those spots carefully. õ, ä, ö and ü are kept, and š and ž appear in loanwords.
Videos from Tallinn and Ida-Virumaa often switch into Russian, and tech or startup talk into English. Russian may come out in Cyrillic. Võro and other South Estonian speech is written as standard Estonian and needs more work. Estonian is a mid-resource language for the model: clear speech gives a usable draft that needs a careful read.
Estonian videos people transcribe
Common uploads:
- University lectures and recorded seminars, for notes.
- Interviews filmed for a thesis, for the written appendix.
- News clips, interviews and podcasts filmed for YouTube.
- Recorded meetings and webinars from Estonian companies.
- Family videos and interviews with grandparents.
Estonian subtitles (subtiitrid)
Export SRT or VTT for Estonian subtitles in YouTube Studio or your editor; UTF-8 keeps every letter. Fix the text before exporting, since subtitle lines follow the edited transcript.
DOCX, PDF and TXT suit reports; CSV gives one row per line with its time. Speaker labels are available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.
Translation and audio-only files
Estonian compounds are easy for machine translation to split the wrong way, so correct them in the transcript first.
The transcript is written in Estonian as it was spoken; nothing is translated. To read it in English, open the Google Translate link on the transcript, or use the AI prompt export to hand the text to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. For recordings without video, see the Estonian audio to text page.