Turn Japanese meetings, interviews and lectures into searchable text with speaker labels — kanji, hiragana and katakana as they should be written.
iOS and Android. 30 minutes free, no card.
Does SozAI transcribe Japanese?
SozAI transcribes Japanese audio and video into text using kanji, hiragana and katakana as appropriate, with automatic speaker labels and word-level timestamps. It 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.
日本語, written the way it is actually written.
Specification
| Native name | 日本語 |
|---|---|
| ISO 639-1 code | ja |
| Writing system | Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana |
| Text direction | Left to right |
| Speakers worldwide | ~125 million |
| Varieties covered | Standard (Tokyo), Kansai |
| 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 | 420 |
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 Japanese, or leave detection on. Recordings that mix Japanese with English technical vocabulary stay in a single transcript.
The transcript arrives with speaker labels and word timestamps. Search it, ask it questions, generate a summary in Japanese, or export SRT and VTT subtitles.
Field notes
Japanese is written without word boundaries, so the transcript has to decide where words begin and end before it can time-align them or make them searchable. Two segmentations of the same sound sequence can both be valid Japanese with different meanings. This is why word-level timestamps in Japanese are a harder claim than in a spaced language.
The same word can be written in kanji, hiragana or katakana, and the choice signals register, emphasis or foreignness. Writing everything in hiragana is technically readable and looks like a child wrote it; over-applying kanji reads as stiff. A usable Japanese transcript has to make the same choices a person would.
Japanese has an unusually dense field of homophones — kikan, koutai, seikou each map to many different kanji spellings. The audio contains no information about which one was meant. Selecting the right characters is a language-modelling problem, and it is where most remaining Japanese transcription errors live.
Honorific, humble and plain registers use different verbs, not just different endings, and Japanese business recordings move between them constantly. A transcript that flattens keigo is not merely less polite — it misrepresents who was deferring to whom, which matters in a meeting record.
From the archive
420 public Japanese transcripts so far — every one produced by the same engine described above. Read them in full, no account needed.
【山口拠点】パナソニック インダストリー株式会社 拠点紹介動画 — Transcript
【神回】変化がエグすぎるぷに大で戦ったら顔面ぶち当たって吹っ飛んだwww — Transcript
2/13働き方改革セミナー — Transcript
【必ずこれして】2025年以降にYouTubeで伸びるプロの企画・台本の作り方を大公開します！【アルゴリズム対策】 — Transcript
(Subtitles!) 90 years old! 90 Questions to Mika Takishi… — Transcript
【何度も読むのは逆効果】賢い人は必ずやっている！一撃で覚えるズルい暗記術【東大理三卒・元鉄緑会講師】 — 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.
It uses kanji, hiragana and katakana the way a person would write them, rather than defaulting to all-kana output. This is what makes the transcript readable at normal speed and searchable — kana-only Japanese is technically decodable but nobody reads documents that way.
Yes. Diarization runs on the audio rather than the language, so each speaker gets a label and every turn a timestamp. For 議事録 and interview records this is what turns a recording into a document you can circulate.
Accuracy is highest on clear, single-speaker standard Japanese and drops on fast overlapping conversation, heavy Kansai speech and poor phone audio. The most common residual errors are homophone choices — the sentence structure is right and one word is written with the wrong kanji, so proofreading is worth budgeting for.
SozAI exports SRT and VTT in UTF-8 with word-level timing, so Japanese text loads correctly in YouTube, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Line breaking still deserves a human pass, since Japanese 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 language does not change the price. Current plans are listed on the pricing page.
Where to use it
Everything below works in Japanese, with the same speaker labels and word timestamps.
Transcribe your first Japanese recording
Record, upload a file or paste a link. Speakers, timestamps and a Japanese 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.
