Icelandic accuracy: plan for a full review
Icelandic is spoken by fewer than 400,000 people, and the speech model has seen little of it. The output is a draft. Expect corrections in most sentences, and check every name, place name and technical term.
One clear speaker close to the microphone gives the best result: a lecture, a dictated memo or a studio interview. Phone calls, gatherings with several speakers and outdoor recordings in wind give much weaker text. For those, the timestamps mainly help you locate passages while you type the correct version.
Icelandic grammar adds work. Nouns, adjectives and even names change form across four cases, so the model may pick the right word with the wrong ending. Reading the draft against the audio is still faster than typing from scratch.
New Icelandic words coined for modern things, such as tölva for computer or sími for phone, are usually recognized. Rarer coinages and technical vocabulary in fields like geology, fishing or law are more likely to be replaced with a similar-sounding common word, so give those passages a second listen.
Icelandic letters in the transcript
The transcript uses the Icelandic alphabet, including letters most speech tools rarely produce. These are the points to check.
- Þ and ð can be swapped, since both sound like th. Þ starts words, while ð appears inside and at the end of them.
- Accented vowels á, é, í, ó, ú and ý may be written without the accent, which changes the word.
- Æ and ö are usually present but can be replaced by ae or o.
- Patronymic names (Jónsdóttir, Sigurðsson) and place names are often misspelled.
- Numbers may appear as digits or words, and Icelandic numbers one to four inflect, so spelled-out numbers need checking.
Icelandic, other Nordic languages and auto-detect
On auto-detect the model can mistake Icelandic for Norwegian, Danish or Swedish on short clips, and sometimes switches to English when the recording opens in English. The result is a transcript in the wrong language and spelling.
This page preselects Icelandic. If you get Scandinavian text back, check the setting and run the file again. Faroese is not on the language list. If you upload Faroese with Icelandic selected, expect a rough approximation in Icelandic spelling.
Icelandic has fewer regional accents than most languages, so where the speaker grew up matters less than recording quality. Northern speech, with its voiced consonants and hard stops, is still occasionally misheard, and older speakers using rural vocabulary may see unusual words replaced by more common ones. Mark those passages and check them against the audio.
English mixing and who uploads
Icelanders hear a lot of English, and younger speakers mix English words and phrases into everyday talk. These usually come through in English spelling. If English dominates a file, choose English for it.
Common uploads are university lectures, research and journalism interviews, local podcasts, and YouTube videos that need Icelandic subtitles. Icelanders in Denmark, Norway and the US send family recordings, and descendants of Icelandic settlers in Canada, around Gimli in Manitoba, bring older recordings of relatives. Oral history projects in Iceland record farmers, fishermen and older speakers.
Uploading and exports
Upload MP3, M4A, WAV, WhatsApp voice notes or MP4 and MOV video without converting, record in the browser, or import a YouTube or TikTok link. The transcript is split into timestamped paragraphs, and the player highlights the current line.
Exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV keep þ, ð and the other Icelandic letters. To read the content in English, use the Google Translate link or the AI prompt export with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. Files are never used to train AI models.