Urdu audio to text: a rough first draft
Urdu has far less training data in the speech model than English, Spanish or even Hindi. Treat the transcript as a rough first draft that needs a full review, not a finished document. Expect missed words, wrong word boundaries and misspellings, even on good audio.
Clear audio makes the biggest difference. One speaker close to the microphone in a quiet room gives a draft that is worth correcting. Phone calls, family gatherings, wedding videos, music underneath and people talking over each other give much weaker results. Check every name, place, religious term and technical word before you rely on the text.
Reviewing a draft is still quicker than typing an hour of speech from scratch. Play the file, follow the highlighted line, and click any line to hear it again before you correct it in place.
Urdu script in the transcript
Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script, right to left, and is usually printed in the Nastaliq style. The transcript gives you Urdu text; how it looks on screen or in Word depends on the font on your device. Some details may differ from what you would type yourself.
- Letters specific to Urdu, such as ٹ, ڈ, ڑ, ں and ے, may now and then be swapped for a similar letter.
- The two forms of he (ہ and ھ) and the two forms of ye (ی and ے) are common places for small errors.
- Now and then a character may appear in its Arabic form, such as ي or ك instead of the Urdu form.
- English words may be kept in Latin letters or written in Urdu script, sometimes both ways in one file.
- There is no Roman Urdu output. If you need Roman Urdu, convert the text afterwards.
Urdu, Hindi and auto-detect
Everyday spoken Urdu and Hindi are very close. If you leave the language on auto-detect, the model can label Urdu speech as Hindi and write the whole transcript in Devanagari. This page preselects Urdu so the transcript comes out in Urdu script. Auto-detect can also misjudge short voice notes and clips that open in English.
Many speakers in Pakistan and abroad mix English words and whole phrases into Urdu. Keep Urdu selected when most of the speech is Urdu. If it is an English call with a few Urdu sentences, choose English for that file. Recordings that are mostly Punjabi, Sindhi or Pashto will not be transcribed well with Urdu selected, so pick the language being spoken where it is in the list.
Who uses Urdu transcription
Large Urdu-speaking communities live in the UK, the US, Canada and the Gulf states. People there bring interviews with parents and grandparents, WhatsApp voice notes from family, recorded bayan and religious talks, poetry and mushaira recordings, podcasts, and YouTube videos that need Urdu subtitles. Researchers and journalists transcribe interviews, and some prepare a draft of a client interview before a professional translator works on it.
You do not need to convert anything first. WhatsApp and Telegram voice notes, phone recordings in M4A, and MP4 or MOV videos all upload as they are. Recited poetry and religious recitation use vocabulary and rhythm that differ from everyday speech, so check those transcripts against a printed text where one exists. RocketScribe does not claim legal or medical compliance, so have anything important checked by an Urdu speaker.
Exports and reading it in English
TXT, DOCX for Word, PDF, SRT, VTT and CSV keep the Urdu script as written. Speaker labels are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack, which helps with interviews and family recordings with several voices.
RocketScribe transcribes Urdu in Urdu. To read it 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. Because the draft can contain errors, review it before translating anything important.