Generate subtitles for your Swahili videos

About Swahili transcription

Swahili (Kiswahili) is written in the Latin alphabet and spoken principally in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and the wider East African region. Subtitles generated here come back in that script, as ordinary written Swahili, ready to use in an SRT or VTT file.

Swahili is highly regular in its spelling and transcribes cleanly as a result. Kenyan and Tanzanian usage differ in vocabulary, and urban speech mixes in English heavily, particularly in Nairobi.

What people caption in Swahili

The Swahili material that comes through most often is news, educational content, sermons and vlogs. All of it works the same way — upload the file, check the transcript, export the subtitle track.

Getting a better Swahili transcript

• Set the language to Swahili rather than leaving detection on, particularly for clips under a minute where there is little audio to judge from.
• Upload the highest-quality audio you have; compression artefacts cost more accuracy than most people expect.
• Check proper nouns, place names and numbers first — recognition errors concentrate there.
• Read the transcript before exporting. Swahili subtitles are editable up until you download them.

Swahili subtitles in another language

The same Swahili audio can produce subtitles in any of the 76 supported languages instead of in Swahili itself. English is the most common target, but every pair works, and the translated file keeps the original timings so it drops onto the same video unchanged.