Yoruba video in
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 next to a player. Click a line to hear it again and correct the words in place; edits save automatically.
Tone marks and what to expect
Yoruba has very little training data in the speech model, so expect a rough draft with many corrections. Written Yoruba uses tone marks (à, á) and dots under letters (ẹ, ọ, ṣ), and the model often leaves them out or puts them in the wrong place. Restoring them is a large part of the editing, especially for names and proverbs.
Yoruba speakers in Lagos and the diaspora switch to English, and sometimes Nigerian Pidgin, all the time. English sentences tend to come out better than the Yoruba around them. If a video is mostly English with Yoruba phrases, select English instead and fix the Yoruba lines by hand. Speech in Pidgin is not a separate setting and will need extra correction. Slow, clear speech by one person near the microphone gives the best draft.
Yoruba videos people transcribe
Typical uploads:
- Yoruba films and skits, as a starting point for subtitles.
- Sermons, church services and Islamic lectures posted on YouTube.
- Interviews and news segments, for quotes.
- Owambe speeches, family videos and elders' stories.
- Lessons for children learning Yoruba in the UK or the US.
Subtitles and exports
Export SRT or VTT once the draft is corrected. The files are UTF-8, so tone marks and underdots survive in YouTube Studio and video editors. Some older fonts place the combined marks badly; a font with full Latin extended support, such as Noto Sans, displays them cleanly. DOCX, PDF and TXT give a written version. Speaker labels are available on paid plans and with a Minute Pack.
English and the audio page
The transcript stays in Yoruba; 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. Translation of Yoruba is also less reliable, especially for proverbs and praise poetry, so check with a speaker. For audio-only recordings, see the Yoruba audio to text page.