German audio to text converter

Yes. In our test the transcript used ä, ö, ü and ß wherever they belonged (“großer”, “gleichermaßen”, “Größe”) and capitalised nouns such as “Unabhängigkeitserklärung” and “Schatzkarte”, so the German transcript reads like normal written German.

One piece out of forty came back entirely in lower case with no punctuation, nouns included. It stands out at a glance; capitalise it by hand or replay that minute.

Because German glues words together and speech gives no clue where a hyphen goes. The transcript wrote “Blog-Erfahrung” for Blogerfahrung and “Unterwasser-Topologie” for Unterwassertopologie, and left “Cheops Pyramide” and “Nord Kivu” without their hyphens.

A quick pass with the Duden or a German spell-checker settles most of them; give names of products, places and projects the closest look.

It transcribes standard German with any accent the same way, as the page has only one German setting. Our test recordings came from Germany and used ß; Swiss Standard German writes ss instead (Strasse, not Straße), so adjust those words for Swiss readers.

Swiss German dialect, Schweizerdeutsch, is mostly spoken rather than written and differs a lot from the standard. Try a short clip first if your recording is in dialect. For recordings that mix German and English for long stretches, use the main audio to text converter, which detects each piece’s language.

NoteOwl understands German on your Mac: it transcribes German recordings and meetings with unlimited transcription, labels each speaker and keeps every word searchable, all without uploading anything. Its dictation, free to use, writes German into any app.