Blog · Explainer

Egyptian Arabic transcription: why it is hard and how to fix it

By the Echo team · Published 22 October 2026 · 5 min read

Why is Egyptian Arabic hard to transcribe?

Egyptian Arabic is the everyday spoken language of Egypt. You hear it in offices, classrooms and phone calls across the Gulf, often between colleagues who also switch into English. For transcription software it is hard for three reasons.

1. There is little labelled speech to learn from. Researchers who build speech tools say so directly. The abstract of a 2018 University of Edinburgh PhD thesis opens by stating that dialectal Arabic speech research “suffers from the lack of labelled resources and standardised orthography.” Software learns from recordings that people have already checked and typed out, and there are far fewer of those for dialects than for written Modern Standard Arabic.
2. There is no standard spelling. Modern Standard Arabic has written rules that most educated writers follow. Egyptian is mostly written informally, so one word can be spelled several ways. You will see عشان and علشان for the same word, and a tool may choose a spelling that differs from the one your team uses. A correct word can look wrong.
3. Speakers mix in English. A typical sentence is «إحنا هنعمل الـ review بكرة الصبح», which means “we will do the review tomorrow morning.” The English word sits inside an Arabic sentence, and the tool has to handle both languages in the same line.

How accurate are speech tools on Egyptian Arabic?

The clearest measurement comes from a 2015 study of Egyptian speech recognition, published in the proceedings of the ANLP workshop. The researchers asked five different people to transcribe the same recorded segments. When the machine’s output was compared with each person’s transcript on its own, its word error rate was between 76.4% and 80.9%. When the scoring accepted any of the five spellings as correct, the combined error rate fell to 53%.

The gap between those numbers shows that a large part of the apparent error was spelling choice, not wrong words. The study used systems from 2015, so its figures do not describe any product sold today. What they do show is why a single “correct” transcript is a poor test for Egyptian Arabic, and why you should judge any tool on your own recordings.

A later public challenge, MGB-3, used 16 hours of Egyptian YouTube videos across seven genres. It was built because the field needed more dialect speech to train and test on, which is the same gap the thesis describes.

How do you get a clean Egyptian Arabic transcript?

You cannot remove the three problems above, but you can reduce each one.

1. Record close to the speakers. Put the phone or laptop in the middle of the table, closer to the quieter voices, and turn off fans, music and notifications. Cross-talk is harder for any tool than a clear voice in a quiet room.
2. Choose a tool built for dialect and mixed speech. Check that it covers Egyptian Arabic and recordings that mix Arabic with English, not only Modern Standard Arabic. Look for timestamps and speaker turns, so you can check any line against the audio.
3. Agree one spelling convention. Pick one form for common words such as عشان or علشان, and one form for product names. Write it in your notes template so everyone uses it. Consistent spelling makes search work later.
4. List names and terms before the meeting. Names of people, clients and products are the first things a transcript gets wrong. Put them in the agenda, with the spelling you want.
5. Check the parts that matter. Read decisions, numbers, dates and owners against the audio. A summary is a shortcut. The transcript is the record you check it against.

For more on how dialect affects transcripts in general, read Arabic dialects and code-switching, and for the Gulf case, Gulf Arabic transcription. The terms are defined in the glossary.

Can Echo transcribe Egyptian Arabic mixed with English?

Yes. Echo’s Arabic support covers Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi and Modern Standard Arabic, including recordings that mix Arabic with English. On iPhone and Android, Echo records the conversation through the phone’s microphone. On Mac, it records from the menu bar using the microphone and the computer’s audio, so no bot or extra participant joins the call. It works with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.

Each recording comes back as a full transcript with timestamps, a summary with the key points and decisions, and a to-do list. “Ask Echo” can answer questions from your notes. No tool produces a perfect transcript from every recording. Audio quality, overlapping speakers and rare names all matter, so use the review steps above.

Do you need permission to record an Egyptian Arabic conversation?

Tell people and ask before you record, every time. This is good manners, and in some places it is a legal requirement. The law differs from country to country, so check the official guidance from your country’s data protection or telecommunications authority before you record a call or a room. This article is not legal advice.

Where Echo fits

Echo is for people who need searchable notes from Egyptian, Gulf and mixed Arabic-English meetings on iPhone, Android or Mac. The free plan includes 30 minutes of recording a month, up to 15 minutes per recording, with a transcript, summary and to-dos. Echo Pro removes the monthly minute limit and the Ask Echo limit. In the UAE App Store it is AED 149.99 a year with a 3-day free trial, or AED 12.99 a week. Prices for your region appear at checkout; see pricing.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Checked on 22 October 2026.

• Speech Recognition Challenge in the Wild: Arabic MGB-3, arXiv
• Multi-Reference Evaluation for Dialectal Speech Recognition System: A Study for Egyptian ASR, University of Edinburgh Research
• Multi-dialect Arabic broadcast speech recognition, PhD thesis, Ahmed Ali, University of Edinburgh (2018)

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