German video in, editable text out
Upload the video file as it is: MP4, MOV, M4V, WEBM, MKV, AVI or a phone screen recording. There is no need to convert it to audio first; the sound is taken out on our side and the timestamps stay aligned with the original video. If the video is on YouTube or TikTok, choose Import from link and paste the public link instead, and only the audio is fetched.
Recorded Teams and Zoom meetings, webinars and lecture captures are the most common German uploads, and they are often long. Several files can go up at once, and each becomes its own transcript next to a player.
Meetings, lectures and webinars
In a recorded meeting the voices come through a laptop microphone or a conference speaker, which is harder than a podcast. Expect clean text for whoever was closest to the mic and more fixes for the far end of the table. Speaker identification labels who said what; it is available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.
Lecture recordings (Vorlesungsaufzeichnungen) work well when the lecturer wears a microphone. Questions from the room are often faint, so listen back to those lines. Technical vocabulary and English terms such as Deadline, Feedback or Machine Learning are normally written as spoken, in English spelling.
Accent, dialect and mixed languages
Standard German with an Austrian, Bavarian or Saxon accent transcribes well. Schweizerdeutsch and broad dialect are usually written as standard German, so treat that output as a draft. Many Swiss videos, such as presentations and news, use standard German anyway and come out much cleaner.
International teams often switch to English mid-call. Keep German selected when it is the main language and check the English stretches; auto-detect judges the opening seconds, so a video that starts in English can be treated as English throughout.
German subtitles (Untertitel) and exports
Export SRT or VTT to add German subtitles in YouTube Studio, Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve or VLC. Umlauts and ß are kept because the files are UTF-8. Correct the text first and the subtitles inherit the fixes.
For minutes or a thesis appendix, export DOCX or PDF; CSV gives one row per line with its start time, which makes it easy to pull decisions into a spreadsheet.
Privacy and translation
Your videos and transcripts are private and never used to train AI models. You can delete a file and its transcript at any time.
The transcript stays in German. For English, use the Google Translate link on the transcript, or the AI prompt export to ask ChatGPT or Claude for a summary of the decisions in a meeting. For audio-only recordings, see the German audio to text page.