Igbo transcription services

It depends what the transcript is for. Standard igbo izugbe reads consistently for anyone taught it in school, which suits corporate, broadcast and published material. A regional dialect kept as spoken suits linguistic research, community programmes and anything where the specific variety is the point. Because standard Igbo is nobody's mother tongue and the dialects vary noticeably, this is a real editorial decision, not a formatting preference. Tell us the audience and we recommend one, then note it on delivery.

Because the tools are trained mostly on standard Igbo text, and a speech-to-text model has no way to decide whether to normalise a regional pronunciation or leave it as spoken — it just guesses, usually towards whichever form appears more often in its training data. Given that Igbo's own written standard was assembled from three dialect groupings and is spoken natively by nobody, that guess is wrong at least as often as it is right.

We check before we assign the job rather than assume it. Mutual intelligibility between Igbo's regional groupings — north, west, south and east — is genuinely limited, so a transcriber comfortable with one area's speech can struggle with another's. Where a project spans regions, we either assign transcribers by dialect or bring in a second linguist for the parts that need it, and we say so upfront if a recording needs more than one pass.

Because the standard was built for reading and teaching, not born from anyone's home speech. Igbo izugbe was fixed around 1972 out of features from three dialect groupings, deliberately smoothing over sounds those varieties actually have. A transcript that quietly converts everything into it loses information a researcher, a broadcaster or a community organisation may specifically need — and one that keeps the dialect untouched may be harder to read outside that community. We make the call with you, not for you.

There is no flat rate, because no two files take the same work. Runtime, recording quality, how many people are talking, your deadline and whether you also need an English version all move the figure. Dialect also plays a part: a recording that needs dialect-matched assignment or a normalisation pass takes longer than one already in standard Igbo. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Igbo transcriber who has signed an NDA, and nothing is put through public speech-to-text services at any point. If you have your own confidentiality agreement we sign it, if you have retention rules we work to them, and if your policy says the audio goes once the transcript is approved, we delete it.

It is normal work. Phone audio, site noise, focus groups and meetings where three people speak at once all get transcribed. What difficult audio changes is time, and occasionally certainty about a word or a name. We listen to a sample first and tell you straight what we expect to be able to capture, rather than handing you a file peppered with inaudible tags.

In whatever the next step needs: plain text, Word, PDF, SRT, VTT or your own template, with timecodes and speaker labels set the way you want them. The dotted vowels ị, ọ and ụ are delivered in Unicode so they display correctly wherever the file lands. Tell us what happens to the transcript after we send it and we format it for that, not for us.