Why generic speech-to-text struggles with Hindi
Hindi is written in Devanagari, an abugida where every consonant carries an inherent "a" vowel — but spoken Hindi routinely deletes that vowel (a feature linguists call schwa deletion). Generic transcribers trained mainly on English also stumble on Hindi's constant code-switching into English.
Devanagari is a phonetic script, but the gap between spelling and speech is real. The word कमल is written ka-ma-la yet pronounced "kamal"; नमस्ते is na-ma-sté in spelling but "namasté" in speech. This schwa deletion is systematic in Hindi and varies by word position, so a system that transliterates letter-by-letter produces text no Hindi reader would write. Transcribing from the audio itself — the approach Hearlog takes with Google Gemini — sidesteps the problem, because it matches sound to the word a person would actually type.
The second challenge is Hinglish. Urban and workplace Hindi mixes English nouns and verbs into Hindi sentence frames — "meeting reschedule karni hai", "presentation ready hai kya" — several times per sentence. A single-language model tends to force one script or drop the other language. Hearlog is comfortable with the mix, so the transcript reflects how the sentence was really spoken.
Hindi also spans a dialect continuum. Khariboli (the standard), Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj and the distinctive Hindi of Delhi and Mumbai differ in vocabulary, verb endings and rhythm. Hearlog is tested across these varieties so field interviews, family conversations and regional podcasts transcribe cleanly, not just newsroom-standard Hindi.
What Hindi transcription is actually good for
Hindi transcription turns meetings, interviews, lectures and voice notes into searchable, shareable text you can summarise, translate to English and export — without retyping hours of audio.
Journalists use it to turn field interviews into copy the same day. Students convert coaching-class and university lectures into notes they can actually search. Businesses capture Hindi meetings with action items pulled out automatically, and creators repurpose Hindi podcasts into captions and articles. Because the transcript and its English translation are saved together as one note, the same recording serves a Hindi-first and an English-first audience at once.