Finnish audio and video to text

Spoken Finnish and dialects

Everyday Finnish (puhekieli) differs a lot from book Finnish (kirjakieli): mä and sä instead of minä and sinä. A transcript can land on either, so choose one style and edit toward it. Regional speech from Savo, the east or the west, Helsinki slang, and Finnish spoken by Swedish-speaking Finns is harder than clear standard speech.

Vowel length and long words

In Finnish a doubled letter changes the word: tuli is fire, tuuli is wind and tulli is customs. A single missed length is a real error, so listen for it. Words also take many endings, so taloissanikin means 'also in my houses', and rare forms are where mistakes appear. The letters ä and ö are kept.

What Finnish speakers use it for

University lectures, meetings of clubs and housing companies, interviews, podcasts, and captions for Finnish videos. Because Finnish is spoken by few people worldwide, there are few other tools, which makes a transcript you can search and edit particularly useful, for example when you need the exact minute a decision or a quote was spoken.

Which model works best for Finnish

Finnish 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.

Finnish endings and vowel length are the usual trouble for the small model, and rare names and compound words can be mangled. Proof-read for missed double letters, and use short clips with one speaker. A larger self-hosted model copes better with long words.

Subtitles and captions in Finnish

Finnish words are long, so a subtitle line holds fewer words than in English. Never split a word in the middle, give a line a little more screen time, and keep to two lines of roughly 40 characters. SRT and VTT exports are UTF-8, so ä and ö display correctly, and the captions are in Finnish.

The uploader is set to Finnish

The upload box on this page transcribes as Finnish, 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.