Free Cantonese Speech-to-Text

Cantonese is a language in its own right, not a dialect of Mandarin — the two are not mutually intelligible. It is spoken by around 85 million people worldwide, centred on Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong province, with large communities across Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinatowns. Everyday Hong Kong media, interviews and podcasts are recorded in Cantonese and written with traditional characters.

ConvertSpeech transcribes them automatically. Upload your audio or video and our speech-recognition engine writes out the spoken Cantonese in traditional Chinese characters with punctuation, ready to copy into a document, subtitle file or translation tool. It runs in your browser, needs no installation, and your first minutes are free with no account required.

Cantonese and Mandarin share the same character-based writing system but are separate spoken languages with different vocabulary, grammar and sound systems — a Mandarin speaker cannot follow spoken Cantonese. Cantonese also has a much richer tone system, with six to nine tones depending on how you count, so getting the words right depends heavily on clear audio. Choose Cantonese, not Mandarin, when you upload a Cantonese recording.

Written Cantonese uses colloquial characters that never appear in formal Mandarin writing — 係, 唔, 嘅, 咗 and others — to capture how people actually speak. ConvertSpeech is set up for Cantonese and produces natural traditional-character text; as always, the largest factor in accuracy is recording quality — a clear signal with little background noise beats everything else.