English audio and video to text

Accents and dialects

English comes in many accents. Speech recognition copes with most, but strong regional accents, fast speech and heavy background noise cause more mistakes. Choose English rather than automatic detection when you know the language.

Common English jobs

Meetings and calls, recorded lectures, podcasts, interviews, voice notes and dictation. Names, acronyms and product terms are the usual stumbling blocks, so search for them after the transcript is ready.

Mixed-language recordings

If a speaker switches between English and another language mid-sentence, expect the other language's passages to be the weakest. Read those lines against the audio.

Which model works best for English

English is one of the languages Whisper-family models have seen the most speech in, so the small model can give a reasonable first draft from clear audio. That is not a promise of accuracy: it still slips on names, numbers, jargon and overlapping or noisy speech, so proof-read anything you will publish or rely on.

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).

English is the language the models have seen the most speech in, accents included, but that is no promise of accuracy. Heavy accents combined with background noise still cause errors, and names, acronyms and product terms are the usual corrections.

Subtitles and captions in English

Keep English subtitles to two lines of roughly 42 characters and break at phrases, not mid-clause. Export SRT for most video editors and VTT for web players.

The uploader is set to English

The upload box on this page transcribes as English, 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.