Turn German meetings, interviews and lectures into searchable text with speaker labels — Standard, Austrian and Swiss High German, on EU servers.
iOS and Android. 30 minutes free, no card.
Does SozAI transcribe German?
SozAI transcribes German audio and video into text in Standard German as well as Austrian and Swiss High German. It labels each speaker automatically, timestamps every word, writes umlauts and ß correctly, and exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT and VTT. Recordings are processed in EU data centers and encrypted at rest, which is why German-speaking legal, medical and public-sector users tend to ask about hosting first.
Deutsch, written the way it is actually written.
Specification
| Native name | Deutsch |
|---|---|
| ISO 639-1 code | de |
| Writing system | Latin |
| Text direction | Left to right |
| Speakers worldwide | ~135 million |
| Varieties covered | Standard German, Austrian, Swiss High German |
| 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 | 227 |
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 German when you know the variety, or leave detection on. Recordings that switch between German and English — common in engineering and consulting calls — stay in a single transcript.
The transcript arrives with speaker labels and word timestamps. Search it, ask it questions, generate a summary in German, or export SRT and VTT subtitles.
Field notes
German builds nouns by welding them together, so a single spoken word can become a forty-character term that appears nowhere in a dictionary. Written as one word it is correct; broken apart it is wrong and unsearchable. Getting compounds right is what separates a German transcript you can search from one you have to re-read.
Subordinate clauses push the finite verb to the very end, and separable prefixes detach and land there too. The meaning of a sentence is not settled until the last word, so a transcriber that commits early to an interpretation produces text that reads fluently and says the wrong thing. Long sentences in formal German are where this bites hardest.
Schweizerdeutsch differs from Standard German in vocabulary, phonology and grammar far enough that Swiss broadcasts are sometimes subtitled for German audiences. SozAI targets Swiss High German — the standard written form used in Switzerland — and quality on broad dialect speech drops accordingly. That is a limit worth knowing before recording an internal Swiss meeting.
German capitalises every noun, and the formal "Sie" is capitalised while "sie" meaning "she" or "they" is not. The same sound maps to three different written forms depending on register and grammar. A transcript that lower-cases everything is not usable in a document without a full pass by hand.
From the archive
227 public German transcripts so far — every one produced by the same engine described above. Read them in full, no account needed.
OER kompakt – Was sind Open Educational Resources? — Transcript
Diese Geschichte ist zu verrückt, um wahr zu sein — Transcript
Die Geschichte der Vereinten Nationen (UNO) — Transcript
“Wollen” vs. “Mögen” vs. “Möchten” | Super Easy German … — Transcript
“Ach” Explained | Super Easy German (126) — Transcript
Learn German from the Streets of Cologne — 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.
Files are processed and stored in EU data centers and encrypted with AES-256 at rest. For teams under GDPR this is usually the first question, ahead of accuracy: German legal, medical and public-sector users generally cannot send recordings to a service that processes them outside the EU, whatever its benchmark scores look like.
It writes the proper characters — ä, ö, ü and ß — not ASCII substitutions. That is what makes the output paste cleanly into a Word document, a subtitle file or a search index. Swiss recordings follow Swiss convention where ß is written as ss.
Austrian Standard German is well covered. For Switzerland, SozAI targets Swiss High German, the standard written variety; broad Swiss dialect speech is noticeably harder and accuracy drops. If a meeting runs in dialect, expect to correct more than you would for a Standard German recording.
Yes. Diarization runs on the audio, so it labels each speaker and timestamps every turn regardless of language. For Protokolle and minutes this is the difference between a document you can circulate and a transcript somebody still has to attribute by hand.
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 is the same for every language. Current plans are listed on the pricing page.
Where to use it
Everything below works in German, with the same speaker labels and word timestamps.
Transcribe your first German recording
Record, upload a file or paste a link. Processed and stored in the EU, with speakers and timestamps.
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.
