Your audio
Bring your own Japanese audio
Wakatta is not limited to its catalogue. Import a lecture, an interview, a voice note from a friend or anything you can share from another app, and it comes back as a transcript you can tap word by word — with the same dictionary, explanations and saved moments as a podcast.
MP3, M4A, WAV… in Japanese. We transcribe it and the file is discarded from the server.
Record your own audio in Japanese. We transcribe it and the file is discarded from the server.
Pick any of the three — watch the daily meter move as it transcribes. It is shared with catalogue transcription and resets every day.
The best Japanese you hear is often not on a podcast. It is the recording of your class, the voice message you only half understood, the interview someone sent you. That material is usually where the learning is, and usually where the tools stop.
Four ways in
Pick a file from your phone, paste a URL, record a voice note in the app, or send audio to Wakatta from any other app through the iOS share sheet. MP3, M4A, WAV and friends. Whichever way it arrives, it comes back as a tappable transcript.
Everything the podcasts get
Your clip opens in the same player, with the same transcript following the same audio. Hold a word for its dictionary card, ask for a sentence to be explained, mark the moment you got lost. Your saved words from a voice memo sit next to the ones from a podcast — it is one review queue, not two.
One thing only your own audio gets: if the transcription mishears a word, you can correct it. The transcript is yours, so you are allowed to fix it.
How much you can bring
There is a daily allowance for new transcription on the free tier, shared with anything new you open from the catalogue, plus a ceiling on how long any single clip can be. The meter lives in Library so you always know where you stand, and it resets every day.
What happens to your audio
It is transcribed and then deleted from the server. The only copy that stays is the one on your phone, which is what plays it back. Being able to replay from the cloud is something we want to add later; today it simply is not stored there.
And your clips stay yours in a second sense: the example sentences other learners see under a dictionary word are mined only from the public catalogue. Audio you imported is excluded from that corpus by construction — a sentence from your meeting recording can never surface in someone else's word card.
Importing your own audio needs a free account, because the clip has to belong to someone.
Bring the Japanese you actually need to understand
Free to start. Importing your own audio needs a free account.
