How it works for Sanskrit video
Drop in the video file without converting it: MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, AVI, 3GP or a screen recording from your phone. The audio is pulled out on our server, so every timestamp still points to the right moment in the video. If the video is online, choose Import from link and paste a public link from YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Dropbox or Google Drive, or a direct link to the file; only the sound is downloaded.
The draft opens beside a player. Click a line to replay a verse as many times as you need while you correct it.
Be ready to correct a lot
Sanskrit has very little speech training data compared with modern languages, so the model makes many mistakes: wrong sandhi, dropped visarga, split or merged compounds and modern Hindi spellings. Treat the output as a rough Devanagari draft. It still saves typing, because the timestamps and line breaks are already in place and you only fix the words.
Results are best with slow, clear recitation by one voice. Chanting with melody, group recitation and recordings with a drone or harmonium are much harder.
Talks that mix Sanskrit with Hindi or English
Most videos are not entirely in Sanskrit: a teacher recites a shloka from the Bhagavad Gita or an Upanishad and then explains it in Hindi, English or another language. In that case, select the language of the explanation instead, Hindi or English for example. The commentary will come out well and you only need to fix the quoted verses, which is less work than correcting a whole Sanskrit draft.
- Gita and Upanishad classes on YouTube.
- Stotra and mantra recitation for study.
- Lectures from Sanskrit departments and online courses.
- Spoken Sanskrit lessons and conversation videos.
Devanagari subtitles
SRT and VTT exports are UTF-8 Devanagari. YouTube shows them correctly; in an older editor that shows boxes, choose a font such as Noto Sans Devanagari. There is no built-in IAST transliteration; you can ask an AI assistant for it through the AI prompt export and then check the diacritics yourself.
Translation and the audio page
The transcript stays in Sanskrit; there is no built-in translation. To read it in English, open the Google Translate link on the transcript, or use the AI prompt export to hand the text to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Check any translation against a trusted edition and commentary, since machine translation of Sanskrit verse is unreliable. Your corrected Devanagari can also be exported as DOCX or PDF to keep alongside your study notes. For audio-only recordings, see the Sanskrit audio to text page.