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Premiere Pro speech to text not working

Most speech-to-text failures in Premiere Pro come down to a missing language pack, the wrong audio track, or an audio clip Premiere can't read. Check these seven in order.

1. The language pack isn't installed

Premiere downloads a pack per language the first time. Open Preferences, find Transcription, and check the language's status. A stalled download looks like a transcribe button that does nothing.

2. Wrong audio track selected

In the Transcribe dialog, choose the track that holds the dialogue. Transcribing a music track returns nonsense or nothing.

3. The audio is muted or disabled

A muted track or a clip with audio disabled transcribes as silence. Unmute and try again.

4. Auto detect picked the wrong language

Set the language manually in the dialog. Accents and short clips confuse auto detect.

5. Very long sequence

Transcribing an hour of audio takes a while and looks frozen. Transcribe in and out points instead of the whole sequence, or wait it out.

6. Outdated Premiere

Speech to text moved from cloud to local in 2022 and has changed since. Update through Creative Cloud; old versions have known transcription bugs.

7. Corrupt cache

Clear the media cache in Preferences and restart. It resolves a surprising number of "stuck at 0 percent" cases.

Still nothing

Export the audio as a WAV, import it fresh, and transcribe that. If it works, the original clip's audio encoding was the problem. Whisper-based plugins read almost anything, which is another way around a stubborn file.