Convert French audio to text
French audio transcription for Metropolitan and Québécois recordings — correct accents, grammar-aware punctuation, English translation on Pro.
By Anubhav Jain, Trustample founder · Updated July 2026 · Claims verified against the live product
Free: 60 min per 30 days, files up to 30 min / 50 MB · Paid plans: 10 to 100 hrs, files up to 2 GB. Big video? Upload just its audio track — same transcript, much faster upload.
Encrypted in transit · audio & video auto-delete in 30 days · never used to train AI
Optional settings
Set this for the most accurate result on quiet or mixed audio.
Get a second copy translated into another language (Pro).
Uncommon words the AI might misspell — list them so they come out right.
For Canadian teams, francophone research and cross-border business, French transcription is table stakes that most US tools do poorly. Trustample transcribes French natively — accents (é, è, ê, ç), elisions and French punctuation conventions included — and handles Canadian French, which differs enough in pronunciation to trip up weaker models.
Set the spoken language to French before uploading; auto-detect works, but naming the language up front is more reliable on quiet or casual recordings. Add names, companies and technical terms to the custom vocabulary box first — proper nouns are the words any model is likeliest to miss, in French as in every language.
French audio transcription starts free — an hour of audio every month, individual files up to 30 minutes, plain-text export, no card on file. That covers a lecture, an interview or a stack of voice notes at no cost. Paid plans add DOCX/PDF/SRT/VTT exports, longer files, and built-in English translation — on Pro, tick "Translate transcript to English" and one upload returns the French transcript and an English version together.
How it works
- 1Set 'Spoken language' to French under the upload box.
- 2Upload the recording — meetings, interviews, lectures, voice notes.
- 3Edit inline, export TXT/DOCX/PDF/SRT, or read the English translation (Pro).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Does it understand Canadian French (Québécois)?
Yes — everyday Québécois transcribes well, which matters given how many tools are tuned only for Metropolitan French. Very informal joual and strong regional slang are the toughest cases; expect a few more inline corrections there.
Is there a free French audio transcription option?
Yes — 60 minutes a month, files up to 30 minutes each, TXT export, no card, same engine and synced editor paid users get. Other export formats and built-in English translation are paid. It's a real free tier, not a trial that expires.
Are French accents and cedillas preserved?
Yes — output is proper French text with all diacritics, usable directly in documents and subtitles. DOCX, TXT, SRT and VTT all carry them perfectly.
Can I transcribe a bilingual English–French meeting?
Pick the language that dominates the meeting. Sentence-level switching between languages is genuinely hard for every model; two mostly-single-language recordings transcribe far better than one heavily mixed one.
Can I get an English transcript from French audio?
On Pro, yes — it transcribes the French, then translates that text to English, keeping both so you can check one against the other. Our French audio to English guide walks through the workflow, including the free route.
Can I use this to study French with audio and a transcript together?
It's built for transcribing recordings you have, not for supplying learning material — but it works well on French podcasts or videos you own: the transcript sits beside a synced player, so you can read along and click any sentence to replay it. Published learner courses remain the better source for graded audio.
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