Transcribe Japanese audio to text
Upload a Japanese recording and get an editable transcript with timestamps and speaker labels, then export it as TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT or VTT.
Spoken language
日本語
What Japanese looks like on the page
会議は九時に始まります。 EN The meeting starts at nine. An example sentence for illustration, not transcript output.
Notes on Japanese
- Script
- Mixed: kanji, hiragana and katakana, plus Latin letters and digits
- Direction
- Left to right in the transcript (books often use vertical text, screens rarely do)
- Word spacing
- None; sentences are written without spaces between words
- Speech levels
- Plain, polite (desu/masu) and honorific registers
Japanese is written without spaces and in three scripts at once, which changes what a transcript has to do. A sentence heard once as sound becomes a run of kanji, hiragana and sometimes katakana, and several of those choices are matters of style rather than correctness. That is why the editable transcript matters here: you will probably want to standardise how a company name, a dish or a place is written.
Register is the other thing that sets Japanese apart. The same speaker may shift from plain to polite to honorific speech inside one meeting, depending on who is being addressed. The transcript keeps what was said, so if you need a cleaned-up version for minutes, the original is there to compare against.
Typical recordings include business meetings, interview series, university classes and video content for subtitles. Overlapping speech, soft sentence endings and background music reduce quality, and accuracy varies with audio quality, accents and background noise. Short, well-recorded files are the easiest place to check how a voice comes out before you upload a long batch.
Questions
How does Japanese transcription choose between kanji and kana?
Many words can be written in kanji, hiragana or katakana. The transcript picks one spelling, and you can change it in the editor, which is useful for names and technical terms.
Are speaker names and honorifics kept in the text?
Spoken honorifics such as san, sama and sensei are transcribed as said. Use speaker labels to attach real names to each voice, then adjust the honorifics to your style.
Can I subtitle a Japanese video?
Yes. Transcribe the file and export SRT or VTT. Japanese subtitles have no spaces, so check line breaks on longer sentences in your player.
Does it work for mixed Japanese and English speech?
Loanwords and short English phrases are common in Japanese talk and usually come through, but long stretches of another language may not. Proofread those parts.
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