Transcription serviceFrench
French Transcription Services
French transcription for France and francophone Africa, staffed by market, with liaison, silent inflection and code-switching handled by convention rather than by guesswork.
Free sample: Send a short French audio clip and we return a transcript in the format and orthography you specify, at no cost, before you commit to a project.
Specification
- Audio
- Wideband, narrowband, mono, or separated channels
- Variant
- France and francophone Africa staffed and reviewed separately
- Accuracy
- Target agreed per project and measured on a held-out slice, with a stated rule for inaudible agreement
- Output
- Verbatim or clean-read text, timestamps, speaker turns
- Review
- Second-pass review on a sampled percentage, rate agreed up front
Dialects and varieties covered
Standard French, Senegalese French, Ivorian French, Cameroonian French.
Who does the work
- Contributor floor
- 1,000+per market
- Markets covered
- 2markets
- Dialects covered
- 4dialects
Coverage is drawn from France and Francophone Africa, where Spirelight already publishes delivered French datasets, so it is demonstrated rather than asserted.
The grammar is silent, so it has to be reconstructed
French collapses most inflection in speech. Parler, parlé and parlez are a single sound, as are parle, parles and parlent, plural marks are usually inaudible, and liaison joins words so the signal offers no reliable boundary between them. A French transcriber is not writing down what they hear, they are parsing a sentence and then spelling the result.
That is why agreement errors, not misheard words, dominate French quality reports. Spirelight scores on a held-out slice of your own recordings and states in the scope how contested cases are handled, so the reported figure counts the errors that matter for your use rather than punishing a defensible reading.
African French is a market, not an accent
Abidjan, Dakar and Yaoundé produce French with their own lexis and their own contact patterns: Nouchi in Ivorian speech, Wolof inside Senegalese conversation, local languages inside Cameroonian audio. An annotator in Paris hears these as mistakes and normalizes them away, which is the fastest way to strip out the variation you paid to collect.
Spirelight staffs the African scope with annotators from those markets and agrees how non-French spans are marked before work begins. The published coverage mirrors the staffing: French (Western) and French (African) are separate datasets for the same reason they are separate pools.
Canadian French is quoted separately
Quebec French differs from European French in its vowel system, in everyday vocabulary, and in the way English appears inside it. The distance is large enough that a France-based reviewer marks correct speech as wrong, and the correction looks like quality work right up until you read the transcript.
Spirelight does not fold Canadian audio into a France scope. If your recordings include it, name it at scoping and it is quoted and staffed on its own.
This service is not the right fit when
- Canadian French inside a France scope. It is its own staffing and its own quote.
- Alsatian, Breton or Occitan audio. Those are separate languages rather than French accents, and each is scoped on its own.
- Machine-only transcription with no human pass.
- Translation between French and English. Transcription stays in the language of the recording.
Related
Need French transcription scoped to your project? Send the audio conditions, volume, and turnaround you need. We will reply with a scoped quote and, if it helps, a free sample.