Punjabi audio to text: an honest view
Punjabi is one of the languages the speech model has the least training data for, far less than English, Spanish or even Hindi. The result is a rough first draft that needs a full review. Expect many corrections on every page, and treat names, places and technical terms as unchecked until you have listened to them.
A single clear speaker in a quiet room gives the most usable draft, for example a talk recorded with a lapel mic or someone dictating close to the phone. Phone calls, family conversations with several voices, and anything with music or singing underneath give much weaker output. Sung kirtan and songs are especially hard for a speech model, so do not expect usable lyrics.
Even a rough draft saves time. Play the file, follow the highlighted line, click a line to replay it and correct the text in place. Anything important should be checked by a Punjabi speaker against the audio.
Gurmukhi output and Shahmukhi
With Punjabi selected, the transcript is written in Gurmukhi (ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ), the script used for Punjabi in India. Punjabi in Pakistan is usually written in Shahmukhi, a script based on the Perso-Arabic alphabet. There is no Shahmukhi setting. A Pakistani Punjabi recording is still transcribed, but expect it in Gurmukhi or, now and then, partly in Urdu-style script, and check it with that in mind.
If you leave the language on auto-detect, a Pakistani Punjabi recording may be labeled as Urdu and written in Urdu script, and an Indian Punjabi recording may be labeled as Hindi and written in Devanagari. Neither gives a true Punjabi transcript. This page preselects Punjabi to avoid that guess.
What to check in a Gurmukhi transcript
Gurmukhi spelling depends on details that are hard to hear, so these are the places where most corrections happen.
- Punjabi is a tonal language, and Gurmukhi shows tone through letters such as ਘ, ਧ, ਭ and ਹ. Words with tone can come out with the wrong letter.
- The addak (ੱ) that doubles a consonant, and the nasal marks tippi (ੰ) and bindi (ਂ), are easy to drop or misplace.
- English words, common in everyday Punjabi, may stay in Latin letters or be written in Gurmukhi.
- Regional speech, such as Doabi or Malwai forms, can be written in a more standard way than it was spoken, or misheard.
Punjabi-English mixing and the diaspora
Punjabi speakers in India and abroad mix in a lot of English, from single words to whole sentences. Common English words come through, though their spelling varies. Choose the language by what dominates the recording. If a call is mostly English with some Punjabi, choose English for that file. The language is picked per file.
Large Punjabi communities live in the UK, Canada, the US and Australia, and many recordings come from them: interviews with grandparents about migration and family history, community radio and podcasts, gurdwara talks and katha, and calls with relatives in Punjab. Younger people often upload these because they understand spoken Punjabi better than they read it, and a draft transcript helps a fluent relative check and translate it.
Uploading and what to do next
WhatsApp voice notes, phone recordings in M4A or WAV, and MP4 or MOV videos upload as they are, with no conversion step. The transcript is split into paragraphs with timestamps, so you can jump to any part of a long recording. For a long family interview, a practical approach is to fix the parts you need first and leave the rest as a searchable rough draft.
TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV exports keep the Gurmukhi script as written. To read the content in English, open the Google Translate link on the transcript, or use the AI prompt export to ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for a translation, summary or notes. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. Your files are never used to train AI models.