Turkmen transcription: an honest view
Turkmen is a low-resource language for the speech model. Expect a rough draft with many corrections, and words that drift toward Turkish or Azerbaijani spelling. Slow, clear speech from one speaker gives the best draft. Calls, celebrations and group conversations will need much more work.
A rough draft still saves typing on a long recording. Click a line to replay it and fix it in place.
Upload the recording as it is: MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG, OPUS, FLAC or AAC, a voice note saved from WhatsApp or Telegram, or a video file such as MP4 or MOV. You can also record from your microphone in the browser. Long files are split and processed in parallel, so a ten-minute recording usually takes a minute or two.
The Turkmen alphabet
Turkmen in Turkmenistan is written in a Latin alphabet with letters such as ä, ç, ž, ň, ö, ş, ü and ý. Check them closely:
- ň and ý are easy to lose, and may be written as n and y.
- ä and e, and long and short vowels, can be swapped.
- ž may come out as j or zh.
- Turkish spellings may replace Turkmen ones in words the two languages share.
Russian, other scripts and dialects
Many Turkmen speakers, especially in Ashgabat, switch to Russian, and older recordings or speakers may use Russian terms throughout. Keep Turkmen selected when Turkmen dominates. Auto-detect can label Turkmen as Turkish or Azerbaijani, so this page sets it for you.
The transcript uses the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic Turkmen, used before the 1990s, and the Arabic script used by Turkmen in Iran and Afghanistan are not produced. Speakers from those communities may also need more corrections because their speech differs from the standard.
What people record in Turkmen
Uploads include voice messages and calls with family, interviews for research and journalism, lectures, music and poetry, and radio segments. Turkmen students and workers in Turkey, Russia and elsewhere use it to keep a written copy of conversations from home.
Exports and next steps
Export TXT or DOCX for notes and documents, PDF for a fixed copy, SRT or VTT for subtitles, and CSV with one row per line and its start time. Timestamps and speaker names can be switched on or off in each export. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack.
For video files, such as a YouTube interview or a TikTok clip, see the Turkmen video to text page.