Starting with your video
Drop in the video file unchanged: MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, AVI, M4V, 3GP or a phone screen recording. The sound track is pulled out on the server, so there is no convert-to-MP3 step, and every timestamp still matches the picture. If the video is online, paste its public link under Import from link: YouTube, Shorts, TikTok, public Vimeo, Dropbox or Google Drive share links, or a direct link to a video file. Only the audio is downloaded. Playlists and channels are refused, so queue videos one link at a time, and sign-in-only posts such as Instagram need to be downloaded and uploaded.
The draft plays with the video, line by line. Click any line to hear it again and correct the words in place.
A first draft that needs real editing
Malayalam is one of the harder languages for the speech model. Its long agglutinated words, many consonant clusters and fast natural speech lead to a rough draft: expect misspellings, split or merged words, and some lines to rewrite. Slow, clear speech from one speaker gives the best start, and the timed draft is still quicker than typing a long video from zero.
Text is in Malayalam script, including chillu letters such as ൻ and ൽ. Keralites mix English freely, especially in tech, medicine and film talk, and those words may appear in Malayalam letters or in English. Videos by Malayalis in the Gulf, the UK and North America often switch between Malayalam and English several times a minute. Regional accents from Thrissur to Kozhikode are transcribed, with less accuracy for strong dialect.
Malayalam videos people transcribe
Typical sources:
- Malayalam news channel clips and YouTube interviews.
- Classroom lectures and PSC exam-prep videos.
- Church, temple and mosque talks.
- Film and web-series clips, and your own YouTube videos for subtitles.
Malayalam subtitles
Export SRT or VTT after correcting. YouTube shows Malayalam correctly from the UTF-8 file. In desktop editors, choose a font with Malayalam support, such as Noto Sans Malayalam or Manjari, or conjuncts may break apart. DOCX and PDF give a written copy, and CSV a row per line.
Tips and translation
Avoid background music under speech and switch on audio repair for noisy footage. Speaker labels for interviews are available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.
The transcript stays in Malayalam. For an English reading, open the Google Translate link on the transcript, or use the AI prompt export to hand the text to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. For audio-only recordings, see the Malayalam audio to text page.