Speech to Text in Arabic

[Carlo Mov]

I am surprised that Adobe has some languages included in Speech to Text (Transcribe) feature but not a major language which is used and spoken by over 350 million people which is Arabic? With so many Arabic production features now that are aired and uploaded to many online streaming services, it is CRITICAL that Adobe pays respect to it's users who work in Arabic content/film/TV series.  Now that this request is as important as any new update, it is getting huge attention in the media and NLE users everywhere. So I hope that in the next update 23.1 Premiere Pro will have Arabic included in Speech to Text.

Mod note: Edited for content

[hatimmrabet]

We really need an arabic transcription asap, we are paying a subscribtion to be able to improve our content creation but when missing arabic transcription, we cannot use it and we spending more time on captions, developers please take this urgent

[hassan_alhilali]

I would love that to! If anyone has other suggestions that work well please share them.

[flawless_aura4114]

:white_heavy_check_mark: Arabic captions have been included in free Capcut since 2023 + Translation availability. 

:cross_mark: Still no update so far for Pr. 

[Ann Bens]

Moved from beta to regular Premiere forum.

[flawless_aura4114]

Sure, thanks. 

[Anas Dokmak]

when is Adobe Premiere going to add an Arabic language transcript?

[Kevin-Monahan]

Please upvote here, @Anas Dokmak.

Thanks,
Kevin

[flawless_aura4114]

Hi, Kevin. Just curious, what metric does this thread/request need to reach to be considered for very near implementation? 

[mohamad_ali_editor]

I use SaharaSub, a plugin for Premiere Pro that lets you automatically add subtitles in Arabic. It’s convenient because once you install it, it works directly in Premiere. The subtitles are pretty accurate, and any small errors are easy to fix right inside Premiere. I didn't try it yet, but they added support for After Effects, I think it could be really useful too.

[Carlo Mov]

Now that Premiere Pro has a new version (25.2; although we are in April and usually they go by the month, i.e., 25.4!), still no Arabic language for either translation or captioning. After 2 years of complaints, it seems Adobe is XXX, and they are purposely ignoring tons of requests to include Arabic language in the list when in transcript mode or translation.

I bet you, and hear me loud, many people will switch to other NLEs asap.

You have no respect for 350 million people and a lot of Arabic users of Adobe.

We do not use offending language: mod

[Ali Jaber]

Keep the idea you've created alive with regular posts, I hope we, Arabic users, can get more attention this way:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-ideas/speech-to-text-in-arabic/idi-p/13515504

[Carlo Mov]

now DaVinci has transcribe and translate captions in many languages INCLUDING ARABIC. did you hear that adobe? + more AI features that the new Premiere update feels embarrassing.

[intime_1586]

no solution yet, bring it up again

[hassan_alhilali]

It doesn't look like Adobe cares about adding Arabic transcription anytime soon, at least not to me...

I ended up using SaharaSub after seeing a recommendation on this thread, it's a plugin and it is paid, but I find it worthy enough to keep using it.

[R Neil Haugen]

I understand the frustration, certainly. There's a lot of users that work with Arabic, and other middle-east area languages.

I do find the emotional language odd ... it isn't that 'they' care or don't care. I would guess that like so many decisions, it's simply looking at the percentage of the total user base versus the cost in developer time, then placed in the list of the bajillion or so needed and/or requested changes/additions.

Many of my long-requested color things are acknowledged by the devs to be definitely a very useful thing ... but ... for a small enough sub-set of users, I would not hold my breath ... sigh.

[Carlos5C66]

Emotional language? Where and how? Well tell me something: since you are percentage-driven, honestly, how many users are Norwegian compared to those who are Arabic users? And yet, there is a Norwegian language transcription! How is that working for you in terms of percentage?

[R Neil Haugen]

Remember, I'm another user, and like all users of any of these complex apps, have my own frustrations with it at times. I have no more ability to force change than anyone.

And of course, no clue about the relative number of Norwegian/Icelandic/Danish users (nearly identical languages mostly)  compared to Arabic than any other users.

I do know Adobe has offices and employees working about everywhere on the planet ... one of the intersting things about working with staffers. And at Adobe's big MAX event, there's always a pretty decent contingent of users attending from across the Arabic language area ... Syria through Jordan and Egypt and on. So there are definitely users and staffers in Arabic countries.

Again, I understand the frustration, and totally sympathize. Arabic is far from the only language not currently supported ... and yea, that outright sucks. It's also one of the most beautiful languages to listen to ... I've Arabic friends & acquaintances. I love to hear them talk, even though there's some of the sounds I'd never be able to learn at this point.

But it's so beautiful to listen to. 

[Carlos5C66]

Dear R Neil Haugen,

Thank you for replying. I work in UAE, for a university, so many students are frustrated too, and can't find a sensible reason behind all the exclusion of 350M speakers of Arabic compared to 4.5M of a Scandinavian country.

Plus, all other competitive NLEs have it, even free online NLE like CapCut, InVideo, etc.

However, great reply from you.

Well, as I keep saying - especially now that Adobe have increased their pricing,  soon most Premiere Pro users (maybe 2 years max.) will shift to DaVinci.

Good day sir.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

@Carlos5C66 I too work and stay in the UAE.

Adobe had held surveys over the years in our region (Middle East), they come here in person or online. We had a fruitful meeting with a group of Adobe relevant technical and business staff last Wednesday in order to convey the message and see the development of new Right-to-Left and Arabic / Farsi / Urdu languages features. 

We discussed the feature "Text to Speach" which is being discussed in this thread. I'm not defending Adobe here as I'm not a staff, but I can say that Adobe are working on several RTL features but mainly on the Adobe Text Engine more than anything.

Beside Adobe's reagional office in Riyadh – Saudi Arabia, Adobe staff from San Jose are visiting Dubai early next November, and they would need to meet users, kindly reach out to me to connect you directly with the visiting team in order to present your case as well as other users in the region.

[Zaid Al Hilali]

Talking about percentages, supporting Right-to-Left languages doesn't mean you will support Arabic Language only, rather the support will include all Languages uses scripts similar to Arabic alphabets such as Farsi / Urdu / Pashto / Kurdish / Malay / Uyghor, hence the user numbers will certainly grow massively.

Surely, text-to-speech is something else and had nothing to do with above percentage comparison. Having said that, if third party plugins and online services can do the job, why can't Adobe do it, they have an army of developers, it is better than losing business to DaVinci. Similarly Adobe Acrobat as an expensive application and is considered as leader in the market lacks so much Arabic support whereas much cheaper "competitor" applications supports Arabic better!

[Ali Jaber]

Unfortunately, Premiere Pro still suffers from serious bugs related to right-to-left (RTL) text support. I reported these issues to Adobe years ago, including a detailed demo video highlighting the problems. The team acknowledged them at the time, but unfortunately, nothing has been fixed since.

[Carlos5C66]

True. I totally agree with you. But this issue and post has been around a long time, and while other free NLEs have the Arabic transcript, Adobe can't figure it out yet? Or, they are too lazy to do any meaningful addition or development. They immerse themselves with futile UI facelift i.e., the color highlight of activated tools (on the timeline and in other worksapces: AUDIO, has gone from easily seen visually - blue, to a white activated and grey not activated, which is hard to distinguish. 

Why they screw things up I don't know. Monay wasted on silly things instead of proper development. DaVinci latest version has 100 AI assisted tools, how many Premiere has? Less than 10. 

[R Neil Haugen]

The Premiere staff has made some amazing progress in many areas of the app. I'll give them credit for that. As an editing app, it's still deeper and broader in capabilities than Resolve, and getting nearly even with Avid. Including far more keyboard shorts for example than Resolve.

The BlackMagic paradigm of locking down the UI for any user adjustments, apparently saves them a ton of dev time when they do make changes. A couple of the BM devs have talked around that issue. 

Adobe's giving us a very user customizable UI comes at a routine cost in dev time ... even if there are some UI things we can't control in Premiere (like on screen text size!) that are simply bizarre.

I've worked in both over the last decade plus, and yes teach pro users ... and I find Resolve incredibly frustrating, as I struggle to remember where all the on-screen menus are buried ... and to me, it's backside ugly. A good friend thinks it's gorgeous and has the most intuitive UI ever. Yup, we are all different!

As to relative percentages, I'll add a couple things to think about. First, I don't understand why the population of the country matters so much to some ... as it's the user licenses/user base that is the primary factor here. How many actual users of the app is what matters most.

Next, the great comment about r-t-l languages that improvements would affect a number of them is spot on. And linked to that, note ... Norwegian is not a completely separate language. As I noted above, there are only smallish differences between Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic, so development there pretty much allows use across all three.

But again, it seems it is the user base that counts.

And finally, I've been told the basics of setting dev priority, which includes seven or eight major metrics (Adobe is huge on quantifiable metrics) ... and still, it's a bizarre foggy bottom as a user much of the time.

[Digital_Dewdrop3272]

I would also agree that we need the ability to translate to Arabic within PPro - is this on the roadmap please?