Tamil audio to text: an honest view
The speech model has much less Tamil training data than it has for English or the major European languages. What you get is a rough first draft that needs a full review. Expect to correct words throughout, and check every name, place and technical term before you use the text.
One clear speaker close to the microphone gives the most usable draft: a lecture, a speech, a news-style clip or someone dictating. Phone calls, group conversations, people talking over each other and speech over music produce much weaker output. For those, the draft is mostly a way to find your place in the audio while you type the correct text.
Reviewing is still quicker than starting from nothing. Play the file, follow the highlighted line, click a line to hear it again and fix the text in place. Have anything important, such as a published quote or a legal statement, checked by a Tamil speaker.
Spoken Tamil versus written Tamil
Tamil has a large gap between everyday speech and the formal written language. People say இருக்கு where formal writing has இருக்கிறது, and many verb endings and pronouns are shortened in speech. The transcript may follow what was said, may lean toward the formal written form, or may do both in one file.
Decide which form you want before you review. For research interviews where the exact wording matters, keep the spoken forms and check them against the audio. For an article, report or subtitles aimed at a wide audience, you may prefer formal Tamil and adjust the text as you listen. Speeches, news readings and lectures in formal Tamil are where the model does best, because they are closest to written text.
Tamil script and Tanglish
The transcript is written in Tamil script. A few details are worth checking during review.
- Tamil script uses one letter for sounds such as k and g, or t and d, so the spelling of loanwords and names can look unfamiliar or vary.
- Grantha letters such as ஜ, ஷ, ஸ and ஹ may be used for some loanwords and left out for others.
- English words, which are common in everyday Tamil (often called Tanglish), may stay in Latin letters or be written in Tamil script.
- Numbers can appear as digits or words.
Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil, and the language setting
Choose Tamil for recordings from Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia and anywhere else. Sri Lankan Tamil differs from Indian Tamil in pronunciation and some vocabulary, and the speech model has heard more Indian Tamil. Sri Lankan recordings are transcribed, but expect more corrections. Within India, Chennai, Madurai, Coimbatore and other regional speech also varies, and very local words need checking.
This page preselects Tamil in the upload box. Auto-detect listens to the start of a file and can misjudge short voice notes, clips that open with music, and conversations that start in English. It can also pick a nearby language such as Malayalam. With Tamil selected, that guess is skipped. If a recording is mostly English with a few Tamil sentences, choose English for that file.
Who uses Tamil transcription and what to do next
People bring research interviews, lectures, temple and church talks, political speeches, podcasts, YouTube videos that need Tamil subtitles, and client calls. Tamil families in Canada, the UK, Singapore and Malaysia upload recordings of older relatives to keep their stories. WhatsApp voice notes, phone recordings and MP4 videos upload directly, with no conversion step.
TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV exports keep the Tamil 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.