Common recordings from Greece
University students in Athens, Thessaloniki, Patras and Ioannina record lectures and interview participants for their diplomatiki or master's thesis. Researchers collect interviews in villages and islands, often in a kafeneio or a kitchen with a television on in the background. Businesses in tourism, shipping and agriculture record calls and meetings with partners abroad.
Other frequent uploads are municipal council meetings, local radio shows and podcasts, YouTube videos that need Greek subtitles, and family recordings of grandparents talking about the civil war, emigration to Germany or Australia, or life on the island. Older recordings often come from cassettes or camcorder tapes that someone has copied to a computer.
Recordings made outdoors or in busy cafés need more correction. Wind, traffic, cicadas in summer and background conversations all cost accuracy, so for important interviews choose the quietest room available and keep the phone close to the speaker.
Northern Greek, island speech and older styles
Speech in Greece varies a lot from region to region. Northern Greek, heard in Thessaloniki, Macedonia and Thrace, drops or shortens unstressed vowels, so words can sound clipped and the model may pick a nearby word. Island speech from the Dodecanese, the Ionian islands or Crete has its own sounds and vocabulary. Tsakonian, spoken in a few villages of the Peloponnese, is far enough from standard Greek that the transcript will be a rough draft at best.
Older speakers, lawyers and clergy sometimes use forms from katharevousa, the formal style used in official Greek until 1976. The transcript writes what it hears in monotonic spelling, so formal endings may be modernised or misread. Church services in Koine Greek and Byzantine chant are harder again. Expect to correct quoted liturgical text by hand.
Other languages spoken in Greece
Not every recording made in Greece is in Greek. The upload box takes one language per file, so pick the language most of the file is spoken in:
- Albanian: the largest immigrant community in Greece. Albanian is in the language list, with less training data than Greek, so review the draft fully.
- Turkish: the Muslim minority in Western Thrace speaks Turkish at home and in local media. Choose Turkish for those recordings.
- Russian and Georgian: many Pontic Greeks who came from the former Soviet Union speak Russian or Georgian at home. Both are in the list.
- English: tourism, shipping and university courses for international students often run in English.
- Arabic and Persian: interviews with refugees and asylum seekers are often held in these languages, sometimes with a Greek interpreter in the same recording. If the interpreter and the speaker alternate, split the file or choose the language you need to quote.
A note on privacy
Your files are never used to train AI models. RocketScribe does not make claims about where files are stored or about formal certifications, so if a recording contains personal data, check your university's or organisation's rules first. Greek universities usually expect informed consent from interview participants, and that applies to the recording as much as to the transcript.
Working with the transcript
Upload the recording as it is: an M4A voice memo, an MP3, a WhatsApp voice note or an MP4 video. Audio is taken out of video automatically, and you can also record in the browser with your microphone or import from a YouTube link.
The transcript is split into paragraphs with timestamps, and the player highlights the current line. Click a line to listen again and correct it. Export DOCX for a thesis appendix, CSV to code interviews, or SRT and VTT for subtitles, with timestamps and speaker names switched on or off. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack.
For readers outside Greece, the Google Translate link shows the text in English, and the AI prompt export copies the transcript with a ready-made prompt for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.