French audio to text from France, Quebec, Belgium and beyond
French recordings come from Paris and Marseille, from Montreal and Quebec City, from Brussels, Geneva, Dakar and Abidjan. There is no regional setting to choose. With French selected, the model transcribes the accent it hears into standard written French.
Clear speech in any of these varieties usually transcribes well. Quebec French has its own vowels and a lot of everyday vocabulary that is rare in France, and fast, informal Quebec speech needs more checking than a news-style recording. Regional words are written as spoken, so watch for terms the model has heard less often.
Numbers deserve a quick look. Belgian and Swiss speakers say septante and nonante where speakers in France say soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix. Dates, amounts and phone numbers are often written as digits, but spelled-out regional forms can also appear. If figures matter, compare them with the audio.
Silent endings and other French spelling traps
Spoken French hides a lot of its spelling. Parler, parlé and parlez sound the same. So do a and à, et and est, ces and ses. Plural -s and the -ent of verbs are usually silent. The model chooses the spelling from the context of the sentence, which works well on clear speech, but agreement endings are where errors hide when a sentence is cut short or two people talk over each other.
Elisions such as l', qu', j' and n' are written with the apostrophe attached, and accented letters (é, è, ê, à, ù, ç, ï, œ) appear where standard spelling needs them. TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and CSV exports keep every character.
If you are preparing a transcript for publication or for a thesis, read it once with the audio. Click a line to jump to that moment in the player, correct the word, and move on. Most of the work is in names, technical terms and those silent endings.
Franglais and English inside French recordings
French business speech borrows freely from English: un call, la deadline, le marketing, le feedback. Keep French selected and these words are normally written in their English spelling, as spoken. In Canada, bilingual meetings often switch between French and English. Choose the language spoken most and listen back to the parts in the other language.
Auto-detect is in the language menu, but it can misjudge a short voice note, or a recording that opens in English before the French starts. This page sets French for you so the whole file is handled as French.
Some families and communities mix French with Arabic, Wolof, Lingala or another language. Choose French when it is the main language, and expect the passages in the other language to need manual work.
Common French transcription jobs
People bring French recordings to RocketScribe for many reasons. These come up often:
- Research interviews (entretiens) for theses and social science projects, exported to Word for coding and quotes.
- University lectures and seminars, kept as searchable notes in TXT or DOCX.
- Podcasts and video essays that need French SRT or VTT subtitles.
- Meetings in bilingual Canadian or Belgian workplaces, with speakers labelled on paid plans.
- Family recordings with French-speaking relatives, saved as text that is easy to share.
Reading a French transcript in English
The transcript stays in French, the language that was spoken. To read it in English, open the Google Translate link on the transcript. To get a summary, use the AI prompt export, which copies the French text along with a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT or Claude. Ask for an English summary, the key points or a list of follow-ups.
You can also send a colleague a read-only share link to the French transcript. Speaker identification is available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.