Danish audio and video to text

Pronunciation and regional speech

Danish speakers swallow consonants, soften the d, and slur endings, so words that look different on paper can sound almost the same. Standard Copenhagen-style speech is the easiest case. Jutlandic (jysk), Funen speech and Bornholmsk are harder, and young speakers talking fast are harder again. Faroese and Greenlandic are different languages and are not handled by this page.

Æ, ø, å and Danish spelling

The letters æ, ø and å are part of the output. Danish writes nouns with a small initial letter and joins compounds into one word. Because the spoken stream is so blurred, check the small grammatical words, such as er, at and det, and verb endings, which are where wrong guesses concentrate.

What Danish speakers use it for

Lecture recordings at universities, interviews for journalism and research, meeting notes, podcasts and subtitles for videos. Journalists and students in particular tend to record one person speaking in a quiet room, which is the case that works best. Expect to correct a handful of small words per page even then, and keep the audio playing beside the text while you edit.

Which model works best for Danish

Danish is supported with a good amount of training material, but less than the largest languages, so the small model makes more slips than it does for English or Spanish, especially on rare words, names and fast or noisy speech. Expect a draft that needs a proper read-through.

On tryscriptorium.com the no-account preview and regular accounts run the small model (the larger medium and large-v3 models run when you self-host Scriptorium). In an account, pick Small in the model menu rather than Auto: Auto prefers the fastest, least accurate model for long files or a busy queue.

Danish is one of the harder Scandinavian languages for Whisper-family models, and the small model is no exception, especially with mumbled speech, dialect or several speakers. Record close to the speaker, prefer short clips, and self-host with large-v3 if accuracy really matters.

Subtitles and captions in Danish

Danish subtitles generally use two lines of up to about 40 characters. Since a rough transcript can have wrong small words, proof-read before exporting, because captions put every mistake on screen. The SRT and VTT files are UTF-8, so æ, ø and å show correctly. They stay in Danish.

The uploader is set to Danish

The upload box on this page transcribes as Danish, so the recogniser does not have to guess the language from the first seconds. If the recording is in another language or switches languages, use Audio to text, which detects the language automatically. Automatic transcription is a draft and no accuracy figure is promised: check names, numbers and anything you will rely on.