Lithuanian transcription: what to expect
Lithuanian has far less speech training data than English, German or Polish, so the output is a draft that needs a full review. Expect word endings to be wrong in places, and check every name, place and specialist term.
Lithuanian is heavily inflected. A noun can take many case endings, and the model sometimes hears the right word with the wrong ending, for example the nominative where the speaker used the genitive. These are quick to fix once you know to look for them.
A single clear speaker near the microphone gives the most usable draft: a lecture, a dictated note, a sermon or a podcast with good microphones. Phone calls, family gatherings and people talking over each other give much weaker output. For those, use the timestamps to find your place while you correct the text.
Lithuanian letters and spelling to check
The transcript uses the Lithuanian alphabet with its diacritics. These are the points worth checking on review.
- The nasal vowels ą, ę, į and ų are often dropped or swapped for plain a, e, i and u, because modern speech barely marks them.
- Long ū and short u, and ė and e, are easy to confuse in fast speech.
- Č, š and ž can come out as c, s and z, especially in names.
- Foreign names may be written as spoken in Lithuanian style (Džonas) or in the original spelling (John), sometimes both in one file.
- Numbers can appear as digits or words, and dates may not follow the usual Lithuanian order of year, month, day.
Lithuanian, Latvian and auto-detect
Lithuanian and Latvian are the two living Baltic languages. They are related but not mutually intelligible, and on auto-detect the model can still mix them up on short or noisy clips. Auto-detect also struggles with recordings that open in English, or with a greeting in Russian or Polish, which is common in Vilnius and the southeast of the country.
This page preselects Lithuanian to avoid those problems. If a transcript comes back in Latvian, Russian or Polish, check the language setting and run the file again with Lithuanian selected. If the speaker really uses Russian or Polish for most of the file, choose that language instead.
Samogitian (žemaičių) speech from western Lithuania differs a lot from the standard language. The model writes it as standard Lithuanian, so recordings of older Samogitian speakers need careful review, and some passages may need rewriting by someone who knows the dialect.
English mixing and who uploads Lithuanian audio
Younger speakers and people working in IT or business mix in English terms. Common words usually come through, sometimes in English spelling and sometimes adapted to Lithuanian endings. Choose the language by what dominates the file: a mostly English meeting with a few Lithuanian sentences is better transcribed as English.
Many uploads come from the diaspora in the UK, Ireland, Norway and the US, where families record grandparents talking about life before and after 1990, or save voice notes from relatives back home. Other common files are university lectures, research interviews, local podcasts, church services and YouTube videos that need Lithuanian subtitles.
Uploading and next steps
WhatsApp voice notes, phone recordings and MP4 or MOV videos upload as they are. You can also 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. Click any line to hear it again and fix the text in place.
TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV exports keep the Lithuanian letters. To read the content in English, use the Google Translate link on the transcript, or the AI prompt export to ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for a translation or summary. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. Your files are never used to train AI models.