Tagalog audio and video to text

Tagalog, Filipino and Taglish

Filipino, the national language, is based on Tagalog, and the two are treated as one for transcription here. Metro Manila speech is often Taglish, switching languages inside a sentence. Provincial Tagalog dialects in Batangas or Bulacan differ in words and endings. Other Philippine languages such as Cebuano, Ilocano or Hiligaynon are different languages and are not covered.

Spelling, particles and code-switching

Tagalog is written in the Latin alphabet with a spelling that follows sound closely, but informal speech uses many contractions and particles such as po, naman and kasi. English words inside Tagalog sentences may be spelled the English way, the Tagalog way or wrongly. Numbers and names also differ in style, so skim for consistency.

What speakers of Tagalog use it for

Recorded classes and online lessons, church talks and community meetings, interviews and podcasts, call-center and business call recordings, and captions for YouTube or short-video content. Filipinos working abroad also transcribe family voice messages so they can search them, keep them or share them as text. Teachers record lessons and turn them into study notes.

Which model works best for Tagalog

Tagalog is a lower-resource language for Whisper-family models, and the small model is noticeably less reliable here than for the major languages. Use clear, single-speaker audio, keep clips short, and plan to edit a good deal. For the best result, self-hosting with large-v3 helps.

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.

Tagalog is one of the weaker languages for the small model, and Taglish is harder than pure Tagalog. Keep clips short and clean, avoid music or overlap, and proofread names and English phrases. For important material, self-host with large-v3.

Subtitles and captions in Tagalog

Tagalog subtitles use word spaces, so break at phrase boundaries and keep lines to about 35 to 42 characters. In Taglish video, decide whether English phrases should keep English spelling and apply it consistently. SRT and VTT are UTF-8, so names with accents display correctly in VLC and YouTube.

The uploader is set to Tagalog

The upload box on this page transcribes as Tagalog, 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.