Transcribe Japanese Audio to Text

• Transcribe Japanese audio with no language picker

  Upload your file and the AI detects spoken Japanese on its own. There is no dropdown to set first, which matters when a recording drifts between Japanese and English mid-conversation. If detection ever lands wrong, a manual language override is one click away after the transcript appears.

• Kanji, hiragana and katakana, written naturally

  The transcript comes back as real written Japanese, with kanji where a reader expects kanji and katakana for loanwords, never a wall of romaji. Japanese is dense with homophones, so when hashi comes out as 橋 instead of 箸, the fix takes seconds in the transcript editor.

• Word-level timestamps that survive segmentation

  Every word carries its own timestamp, even though written Japanese gives the model no spaces to mark word boundaries. That precision is what makes karaoke-style captions and text-based cuts land exactly where the word is spoken, and it turns a long recording into something you can search and jump through.

• Edit the audio by editing the text

  Delete a sentence from the transcript and the matching stretch of audio or video disappears from the timeline. Silence removal is automatic in any language, and spoken fillers like eeto and ano vanish when you delete them from the text. See video to text for the full workflow.

• Download TXT, JSON, SRT or VTT on paid plans

  On a paid plan, take the transcript out as plain text for notes, JSON with timestamps for developers, or SRT and VTT subtitle files that drop straight into YouTube. Publishing show notes for a Japanese podcast? The podcast transcript generator walks that exact flow.

• Styled Japanese captions from the same transcript

  One click converts the transcript into timed captions with 176 presets, including word-by-word karaoke styles that fill each word as it is spoken. Japanese viewers grew up on telop-heavy variety TV, so styled on-screen text reads as completely normal there. The Japanese subtitle generator covers this end to end.

• Translate into English and 85 more languages

  Turn the Japanese transcript into English, Korean, Chinese or any of 86 translation languages, then export the translated file or show both languages at once as bilingual subtitles. Translation is a Pro feature and changes the subtitle text only; the original Japanese voice track stays untouched.

• Works on audio files and 20 video formats

  Feed it MP3, WAV or M4A audio, or upload video directly in MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and 16 other formats. Long MKV or HEVC files may preview roughly in the browser.

1. 1

   Upload your recording

   Drag in an audio file (MP3, WAV, M4A) or a video in any of 20 supported formats. EchoWave runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, so there is nothing to download before you start.

2. 2

   Let the AI detect Japanese

   Run auto captions and the speech recognition identifies Japanese on its own, then writes the transcript in kanji and kana with word-level timestamps. A from-language override is available afterwards if a noisy file ever gets detected wrong.

3. 3

   Review and fix the tricky bits

   Scan for homophone slips, uncommon name readings and dialect vocabulary. Speech models handle standard Tokyo Japanese most reliably, so a Kansai interview may need a few manual edits, and each one is a single click on the cue.

4. 4

   Export the transcript

   On a paid plan, download TXT or JSON for notes and archives, or SRT or VTT for subtitles. On any plan, burn styled captions into the video itself. Audio-only exports (MP3, WAV, M4A) sit on paid plans; free video exports are 720p MP4 with a small removable watermark badge.

• Interviews and meetings

  Turn a recorded client call or research interview into searchable text you can quote accurately. Formal keigo comes through as written, and you can verify name readings before anything gets shared.

• Podcast transcripts and show notes

  Publish a full transcript alongside each Japanese episode so search engines can index what was said. On a paid plan, export TXT for the blog post and JSON if your site renders timestamps next to the text.

• YouTube and vertical video captions

  Japanese audiences expect on-screen text, a habit built by decades of telop on broadcast TV. Download an SRT for YouTube on a paid plan, or burn karaoke-style captions for Shorts, Reels and TikTok.

• Language learners and JLPT prep

  Transcribe a native-speed conversation, then show Japanese and English together as bilingual subtitles to study it sentence by sentence. Word-level timestamps jump you to the exact moment any word is spoken.

• Lectures and seminars

  Convert a 90-minute university lecture into notes you can search instead of scrubbing through audio. Every line links back to its timestamp, so checking the original phrasing takes seconds.

• Journalists and researchers

  Quote Japanese sources precisely by working from a verbatim transcript rather than memory. Edit the cues to mark the passages you need, then, on a paid plan, export a clean TXT for citation.

Based on each tool's public pages as of July 2026. Free tiers, language lists and per-minute pricing change often, so confirm on the current pricing pages before deciding.