Finnish audio to text: long words and double letters
Finnish builds meaning with suffixes and compounds, so a single word can carry what English says in a whole phrase. When the speech model mishears one ending, the word still looks like Finnish but means something else. Read suffixes with care in passages you plan to quote.
Sound length matters too. Tuli and tuuli, or kuka and kukka, differ only in a long vowel or a doubled consonant. Fast or mumbled speech can lose that difference, and the mistake shows up as a missing double letter. The synced player makes this quick to check. Click the line and listen to the word again.
The letters ä and ö are kept in every export, including the direct PDF.
Spoken Finnish versus written Finnish
Most Finns speak puhekieli in everyday situations. Minä olen becomes mä oon, meillä on becomes meil on, and endings get shortened. Your transcript may follow the spoken forms, change them to standard written Finnish, or mix the two within one paragraph.
For research interviews where you need to keep the speaker's own words, check the spoken forms you care about. For a report or article, plan an editing pass to bring the text into consistent kirjakieli. Regional speech from Savo, Turku or Ostrobothnia adds its own word forms and gives more errors than speech close to the standard.
Filler words such as niinku and tota are common in conversation and may be kept or dropped. If you need a strictly verbatim transcript, listen for them during the review.
Audio quality matters more for Finnish
Finnish transcribes well from clear audio, but it is more sensitive to noise and distance than English or Swedish. Names, place names and specialist vocabulary need a review in every transcript. These steps make the biggest difference:
- Place the microphone close to the person speaking. Lapel mics or a phone on the table in front of them work well.
- Record remote interviews locally on each side if you can, rather than capturing a compressed call.
- Keep one person talking at a time in sections you need verbatim.
- Avoid recording next to ventilation, traffic or background music.
- For lectures, put the recorder at the lectern rather than at the back of the hall.
Finnish, Swedish and English in the same file
Finland has two national languages, and many workplaces and universities also use English. This page preselects Finnish, so the transcript is written in Finnish even if the first seconds are in English. Auto-detect decides from the opening, which is why a meeting that starts in English can end up transcribed as English.
The transcript follows one chosen language per file. If a recording switches to Swedish or English for long blocks, those blocks may come out poorly. When the languages come in clear separate sections, cut the file and upload each part with its own language. Single English terms inside Finnish sentences usually stay in English. For a recording that is entirely in Finland Swedish, select Swedish instead.
What to do with your Finnish transcript
Students and researchers use Finnish transcripts for thesis interviews and focus groups, journalists for checking quotes, and families for old recordings of grandparents. Export DOCX to edit and quote in Word, CSV to code interview lines in a spreadsheet, or SRT and VTT to add subtitles to a video. Timestamps and speaker names can be turned on or off for each export, and speaker labels are available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.
If your supervisor or client doesn't read Finnish, use the Google Translate link on the transcript to read it in English, or the AI prompt export to ask ChatGPT or Claude for an English summary.