Moldovan and Romanian
Moldovan is the name long used in the Republic of Moldova for the language most of its people speak. Linguistically it is Romanian, with the regional accent and vocabulary of the historical region of Bessarabia. In 2023 Moldova's parliament replaced the term Moldovan language with Romanian language in its laws, though many people still say Moldovan in daily life.
The upload box has no Moldovan entry. Choose Romanian, code ro, which this page selects for you. The transcript is written in the Latin alphabet with Romanian diacritics: ă, â, î, ș and ț.
The Moldovan accent in the transcript
Moldovan speech has features the model sometimes stumbles over, because most of its Romanian training data comes from Romania. The draft is usable, but these spots need attention.
- The ce and ge sounds are often softened, so ce faci can sound like șe faci. The transcript usually writes standard spelling, but may mishear the word next to it.
- Final e often sounds like i, as in pi for pe or mini for mine. Watch short words, which are the easiest to get wrong.
- Regional words such as harbuz for watermelon or pătlăgele for tomatoes may be misheard on unclear audio.
- Place names in Moldova, such as Bălți, Ungheni or Cahul, and local institutions are the most common corrections.
Romanian and Russian in one recording
Many conversations in Chișinău move between Romanian and Russian, sometimes inside one sentence. Russian fillers like davai, normalno or koroce are common in Romanian speech. With Romanian selected, these short words may come out spelled in Latin letters or misheard as Romanian words.
Choose the language spoken most in each file. Russian is a separate option, so a family call held mainly in Russian should be uploaded as Russian. When a meeting is split roughly in half, try the dominant language first and check the other half by ear.
Auto-detect listens to the first seconds and can pick Russian for a clip that opens with a Russian greeting. That is why this page sets Romanian for you.
Older speakers who went to school in Soviet times may use Russian terms for technical, legal or medical subjects even in otherwise Romanian sentences. Those terms are worth checking one by one.
Cyrillic, Transnistria and Gagauzia
In Transnistria, Moldovan is still officially written in Cyrillic. The transcript is always in Latin script, so it will not match Cyrillic documents from there. In Gagauzia, many people speak Gagauz, a Turkic language that is not in the language list, along with Russian. Gagauz passages will not transcribe reliably.
Typical uploads include interviews for Moldovan university theses, recordings of relatives working in Italy, the UK or Germany, local news and podcasts, church services, and calls with family back home. WhatsApp and Viber voice notes can be saved and uploaded as they are, and video files work too.
For a thesis at a Moldovan university, check whether your department wants verbatim transcription with regional forms kept, or standard literary Romanian. The draft leans toward standard spelling, so verbatim work means adding back forms like pi or șe by hand where they matter.
Editing and exporting
Romanian has less training data than the largest European languages, so read the whole draft with the player running. Click any line to hear it and fix it in place. Export TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT or CSV, with timestamps and speaker names switched on or off. Speaker labels are on paid plans or with a Minute Pack.
The transcript stays in Romanian. To read it in English or Russian, use the Google Translate link on the transcript, or the AI prompt export with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Your files are never used to train AI models.