French audio and video to text

What French audio tends to need checked

French has many words that sound alike and are spelt differently, so a transcript can be phonetically right and grammatically wrong. Proof-read agreement, homophones and accented characters, and fix them in the editor.

French from different places

Metropolitan, Canadian, Belgian and African French differ in accent and vocabulary. Clear audio matters more than the variety, but expect more errors on fast, informal or overlapping speech.

Typical uses

Interviews and research recordings, lectures, business calls with French partners, and French captions for a video you made.

Which model works best for French

French 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).

French has a large amount of training speech behind it. The usual errors are homophones and agreement, which look right on a quick read, so listen to the audio for any sentence you plan to quote.

Subtitles and captions in French

French subtitles are usually two lines of about 37 to 42 characters. Check the apostrophes and the spacing before : ; ? ! after you edit, since typing conventions differ between editors.

The uploader is set to French

The upload box on this page transcribes as French, 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.