Turn Chinese meetings, interviews and lectures into searchable text with speaker labels — Mandarin and Cantonese, Simplified or Traditional characters.
iOS and Android. 30 minutes free, no card.
Does SozAI transcribe Chinese?
SozAI transcribes Chinese audio and video into text for Mandarin and Cantonese, with automatic speaker labels and word-level timestamps. Output can be Simplified or Traditional characters, and exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT and VTT. Recordings are processed in EU data centers and encrypted at rest, and every account gets 30 minutes a month without a card.
中文, written the way it is actually written.
Specification
| Native name | 中文 |
|---|---|
| ISO 639-1 code | zh |
| Writing system | Han (Simplified and Traditional) |
| Text direction | Left to right |
| Speakers worldwide | ~1.1 billion |
| Varieties covered | Mandarin, Cantonese |
| Speaker labels | Yes — automatic diarization |
| Timestamps | Word level |
| Summaries | Yes, in the same language |
| Export formats | TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT |
| Maximum file size | 500 MB |
| Free tier | 30 minutes per month, no card |
| Where data is stored | EU data centers, AES-256 at rest |
| Public transcripts in this language | 192 |
Workflow
Record straight into the app, upload a file up to 500 MB, or paste a YouTube link. SozAI reads m4a, mp3, wav, aac, mp4 and mov.
Choose Mandarin or Cantonese and your character set, or leave detection on. Recordings that mix Chinese with English technical terms stay in a single transcript.
The transcript arrives with speaker labels and word timestamps. Search it, ask it questions, generate a summary in Chinese, or export SRT and VTT subtitles.
Field notes
Mandarin distinguishes syllables by pitch contour, so mā, má, mǎ and mà are four unrelated words. A tone error is a word error, not a pronunciation quirk, and compressed phone audio is exactly where tone contours degrade. This is the single biggest driver of accuracy differences between clean and noisy Chinese recordings.
Chinese is written without word boundaries. Before the transcript can be searched or time-aligned, the system has to decide where words start and end, and different segmentations of the same characters can be equally grammatical with different meanings. Search behaviour in Chinese transcripts depends entirely on getting this right.
They are not mutually intelligible in speech, and Cantonese has its own vocabulary, grammar and written characters. Treating Cantonese as accented Mandarin produces confident nonsense, so it is a separate target. Recordings that switch between them within one meeting remain the hardest case.
The same spoken sentence is written differently in mainland China than in Taiwan or Hong Kong, and the mapping is not always one to one. Choosing the wrong character set produces a transcript that is technically readable and immediately marks the document as foreign to its audience.
From the archive
192 public Chinese transcripts so far — every one produced by the same engine described above. Read them in full, no account needed.
【完結】七歲小蘿莉靠打獵養活全家！天生神力＋系統開掛，全村餓肚子她家狂吃肉！極品親戚上門找打，她一拳一個！短劇… — Transcript
李嘉誠怎麼得罪了習近平？從福州到巴拿馬的30年恩怨【文昭思緒飛揚559】 — Transcript
《我恨明月不照我》- 阿YueYue |「只恨多情曲 配上無情歌…」♫【Multi-Lang Sub動態歌詞】 — Transcript
從「拜把兄弟」到死敵：揭秘習近平與薄熙來34年恩怨，一場由「發蜜」開始，以「女人」定勝負的奪嫡大戲！【江峰視界… — Transcript
王岐山反习三部曲之一：马兴瑞满门抄斩只是前戏 — Transcript
三角眼習維尼定妝照？菲律賓把習近平氣壞了！中紀委內鬼作亂，習官場失控；水災遍地，境外勢力無人捐款了！警惕低價飲… — TranscriptSozAI transcribes over 100 languages. These have a page of their own.
Answers
Short answers you can quote. Longer ones live in the sections above.
Yes, as a separate target rather than as an accent of Mandarin. The two are not mutually intelligible in speech and Cantonese has its own vocabulary and written forms, so selecting the right one matters more than it does for most dialect choices in other languages.
Yes. Both character sets are supported, and the choice affects the whole transcript. Because the mapping between them is not strictly one to one, picking the right one up front produces better output than converting afterwards.
Yes. Diarization runs on the audio rather than the language, so each speaker gets a label and every turn a timestamp. For 会议记录 this is what turns a recording into a document you can circulate rather than a wall of characters.
SozAI exports SRT and VTT in UTF-8 with word-level timing, so Chinese characters load correctly in YouTube, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Line breaking still deserves a human pass, since Chinese subtitle conventions differ from Latin-script ones.
Every account gets 30 minutes per month free without a card. Beyond that SozAI is a flat monthly subscription with a shared pool of minutes, and the price does not depend on the language. Current plans are listed on the pricing page.
Where to use it
Everything below works in Chinese, with the same speaker labels and word timestamps.
Transcribe your first Chinese recording
Record, upload a file or paste a link. Speakers, timestamps and a summary come back together.
Free on iOS and Android. No account required for YouTube transcripts.
Point your camera
Scan the code to open the download page on iOS or Android. 30 minutes of transcription free, no card.
