How well does it handle French?
This is one of the engine’s strongest languages — expect clean, publishable text from clear audio.
European, Canadian (Québécois) and African French are transcribed by the same model.
Liaisons and elisions (l', qu', j') are written out in standard orthography with accents intact.
What you get
Speaker labels
Every voice in the recording is separated and labelled — works in French the same as in English, because diarization listens to voices, not words.
Word-level timestamps
Each word is timed to the audio, which is what makes accurate French SRT and VTT subtitle files possible.
Search & quote
The transcript is searchable in French — jump to the exact second something was said and copy it with its timestamp.
Every export
TXT, SRT, VTT, DOCX and JSON on every pack — no format paywall.
Who transcribes French audio here
Meetings, lectures and radio archives in France, Québec and West Africa.
Questions people ask
Do I need to tell it the audio is French?
No — the language is detected from the first seconds of audio automatically. If a recording mixes French and English, each part is transcribed in the language actually spoken.
Can I get English text from French audio?
Yes. Alongside transcription in French, the engine can translate the speech to English text in the same pass — useful for subtitling French content for an international audience.
Does it work on French video, not just audio?
Yes — upload MP4/MOV/WebM or paste a link; the audio track is extracted automatically and transcribed the same way.
How much does it cost?
The preview is instant with no signup. Credits are one-time purchases that never expire: $4 for 300 minutes, $12 for 2,000 minutes (about 36¢ per hour of audio).
Is this live captioning?
No — Whipscribe transcribes recordings, not live speech. Upload a file that already exists and the French transcript is typically ready in about a minute per half hour of audio.
Related: Audio to text · Subtitle generator · Interview transcription · Bulk transcription