Danish speech to text · Free hours for students
Transcribe Danish audio to text, with speakers and timestamps.
Upload a Danish interview as mp3, m4a, wav or mp4 and get a draft with speaker labels and a timestamp on every speaker turn, ready to correct and export to Word. Students at universities in Denmark and 12 other European countries get 7 hours free every month.
7 free hours of audio a month · No card needed
Students at Danish universities and university colleges, such as the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark, get the free hours once they confirm their university email, international students included.
Try an example
Interview about student life, in Danish
Danish · Two speakers · Fictional excerpt
Interviewer 00:12
Hvad hjælper dig, når en opgave føles uoverskuelig?
Studerende 00:18
Det gør en forskel, at vi kan tale om opgaven i studiegruppen. Så er jeg ikke alene om at finde en vej videre.
Interviewer 00:31
Kan du fortælle om en konkret gang, hvor det hjalp?
How to do it
How to transcribe a Danish interview
1. Sign up with your university email
Use the email from your Danish university or university college and confirm it with the code we send you; international and exchange students qualify the same way. If your student email isn’t recognised, write to us.
2. Upload the recording and choose Danish
Upload your file; recordings several hours long are fine. Choose Danish as the language, or let Spirelight detect it; choosing it yourself is the safer option for a short clip or one that opens with English small talk. No recording yet? Record a video call in the browser with a Danish consent form signed first.
3. Listen, correct and export to Word
Correct the draft while you listen in the built-in player, with extra care for names, numbers, English terms and dialect. Rename speakers across the whole document, then export to Word (.docx), plain text or SRT, or start coding in the same project.
Danish speech
Why Danish is hard for speech recognition
Spoken Danish leaves out a lot of what the spelling promises. The “h” in “hvad” and “hvem” is silent, the “d” in “kan godt lide” disappears, and unstressed endings are often swallowed in fast, casual speech. Even Norwegians and Swedes, who read Danish easily, can find spoken Danish hard to follow without practice.
Then there is stød, a creaky catch in the voice that can be the only thing separating two words: “hun” (she) and “hund” (dog) sound the same apart from it. Standard Danish also distinguishes around 20 vowel qualities. Speech recognition has to pick the right word from context, and quick, informal answers give it little to go on.
Students add their own layer: English terms such as “deadline” and “feedback”, or whole English sentences, in the middle of a Danish answer. Numbers deserve a second listen too, because Danish builds the tens from 50 to 90 on twenty and says the units first: “tooghalvtreds” is 52 and “halvfems” is 90.
- Record close to the speakers in a quiet room. Danish leaves many syllables quiet or half-spoken, and background noise makes them harder to pick out.
- Let your participant finish before you say “ja” or “nå”. Overlapping speech causes more errors and can blur who said what.
Dialects
Dialects and regional speech
Most student interviews are in fairly standard Danish, the variety based on Copenhagen speech, which gives the most reliable draft. Traditional dialects are now spoken mainly by older people, but if you interview older or rural participants, in Jutland or on Bornholm for example, expect more corrections.
West Jutlandic puts the article before the noun (“æ hus” rather than “huset”, the house). In much of South Jutland, the dialect (sønderjysk) uses a tonal accent instead of stød. Bornholm Danish (bornholmsk) has no stød and has kept three grammatical genders. Strong dialect causes more errors, so plan extra listening time for those passages.
If your analysis needs dialect forms written as they were said, add them yourself while you proofread. If you only need the content, standard written Danish is usually fine; say which you chose in your methods section.
Conventions
Transcription conventions at Danish universities
Danish universities have no single standard: your method, department and supervisor decide how much detail you need. Many Danish courses teach from Steinar Kvale and Svend Brinkmann’s InterViews (in Danish, “Interview: Det kvalitative forskningsinterview som håndværk”), which treats transcription as a translation from spoken to written language rather than a neutral copy. So choose a style that fits your analysis, and describe it in your methods section.
For thematic analysis, many courses accept a transcript in ordinary written Danish, spelled as in Retskrivningsordbogen, the official spelling dictionary: what you hear as “ik’” is written “ikke”. Discourse analysis and conversation analysis need more, such as pauses, overlaps, laughter, repeats and hesitations. The guide to verbatim transcription helps you choose.
- The draft gives you the Danish text, speaker labels you can rename across the whole document and a timestamp on every speaker turn.
- You add by hand pauses, overlaps, laughter, dialect forms and anything else your method needs, and you anonymise names, workplaces and places.
- “Word for word” only changes the draft for English recordings. For Danish, both styles give the same draft.
Writing in English
Interviewed in Danish, writing your thesis in English
Many master’s programmes in Denmark are taught in English, so plenty of students write their speciale (master’s thesis) in English while their interviews are in Danish. Spirelight transcribes; it doesn’t translate. The translation is your own work.
Translate for meaning rather than word by word. Small Danish words such as “jo”, “nu” and “altså” often have no direct English equivalent, and a literal version can make a fluent participant sound awkward. Kvale warned that publishing incoherent verbatim speech can stigmatise participants; a stiff literal translation carries a similar risk.
- Keep the full Danish transcript in your appendix (bilag), so your supervisor and examiners can check quotes against the original.
- Translate only the quotes you use, and say in your methods section that the translations are your own.
- For key quotes, consider giving the Danish original in a footnote, and ask a native speaker to check your English version.
- If your study regulations (studieordning) or your supervisor say something different, follow them.
Questions about transcribing Danish audio
Can I transcribe Danish audio to text for free?
Yes, if you’re a student. Confirm a university email from Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Poland, Finland, France or Spain with the code we send you, and you get 7 hours of audio free every month, with no card and no trial. Free hours reset each month and don’t roll over. Everyone else, researchers included, pays €2 per hour of audio, or €14 a month for Spirelight Plus with 10 hours included. Hours you buy separately never expire.
How accurate is Danish speech to text?
It depends mostly on the recording. A clear interview in fairly standard Danish, with one person speaking at a time, gives the best draft. Background noise, overlapping speech, strong dialect and specialist or English terms cause more errors. Treat the transcript as a first draft: listen through it in the built-in player and check every quote you plan to use.
Can I translate Danish audio to English?
Not in Spirelight: it transcribes Danish audio into Danish text and doesn’t translate. Keep the Danish transcript as your source, translate the quotes you use yourself and say that the translations are your own.
What if my interview mixes Danish and English?
Choose the language most of the interview is in. For a Danish interview with English terms scattered through it, choose Danish rather than relying on detection, then check the English words against the audio.
Where is my Danish audio processed and stored?
Transcription runs on AssemblyAI’s servers in the EU. Your files, transcripts and account are stored with Google Firebase in the US. AI summaries and chat are processed by OpenAI in the US. We don’t offer a data processing agreement (DPA). The terms and privacy policy have the details.
Can I upload interviews with personal data at a Danish university?
That depends on your university, and sometimes your faculty. Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark, for example, offer students their own option for transcribing interview data, and Aarhus University tells students that, as a rule, they must not share other people’s personal data with an AI service. Check your university’s rules, ask your supervisor or the data protection officer if you’re unsure, and tell participants where their data goes in your participant information sheet.
Other languages
Transcribing another language?
Each of these pages covers what to expect from that language’s recordings. Interview transcription covers file formats, proofreading and English recordings.
Get started
Stop typing out interviews by hand
Your next step is simple: sign up with your university email and upload your recording. You get a draft you can correct and download in Word.
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