Hebrew & Yiddish
What works in October 2026 for translating, transcribing, typesetting, reading aloud and putting Hebrew in pictures, and where Hebrew and Yiddish still break: garbled letters in images, right-to-left layout, Rashi script and ksav yad.
On this page
Hebrew and Yiddish are where general AI tools still slip most often. The problems fall into five groups: translation, transcription, text in images, layout, and reading old print or handwriting. Each has a different answer, and none of the answers is "trust the first output."
Yiddish and Hebrew are separate problems. A tool that handles modern Hebrew well can still do badly on a Yiddish sicha, so test on your own material.
Translation
The big three chat tools all translate Hebrew competently in 2026. The differences members report are about style:
- Gemini gives looser, more spoken English by default; Claude keeps the layout of a handout better (October 2026, several members). Either can be told to translate more literally.
- Qwen (chat.qwen.ai, made by Alibaba) came out ahead in one member's test of eight chat tools on pesukim in April 2026. Along with the translation it gave the shoresh, other occurrences, a word-by-word transliteration and the context of the verse. Others still prefer Gemini or ChatGPT for sichos. Test more than one.
- For a full book or article, members got the best results by giving the AI their own style rules, a few passages they had translated themselves, and asking it to interview them about word choices before starting (April 2026).
- A PowerPoint into Hebrew with the same layout: members used Copilot inside PowerPoint in two steps, translate first, then fix the right-to-left formatting (May 2026).
Whatever you use, paste the actual text. Asking a chat tool to "translate the sicha from Likkutei Sichos volume 29" invites it to invent one. For where to get clean text, see Dach.dev, Sefaria and Daiah.
Transcription (speech to text)
| Audio | What members use | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A shiur mixing English, Hebrew and Yiddish | Sofer.ai | Built for shiurim. Members still called it "best for Yiddish and loshon kodesh" in July 2026, after an outage of several days that month. A 2025 Yiddish sample was rated about 6 out of 10. |
| Modern Hebrew, free | transcribe.ivrit.ai | A free Hebrew transcription service. Sign-in required. |
| English with Hebrew terms | Whisper-based tools such as TurboScribe or MacWhisper | Handle the switching between languages reasonably. See TurboScribe & Whisper. |
| A WhatsApp voice note | Send it to Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM) or Sofer.ai | Quick and free; check the Hebrew words. |
Dictation is weaker than transcription of a recording. Members found Wispr Flow handles typing in Yiddish but its English-to-Hebrew translation while dictating was "not so reliable" (April 2026), and Hebrew words in voice-note transcripts still come out garbled in agent setups (August 2026). The full comparison is on Transcription and the step-by-step is in the transcription guide.
Hebrew in pictures
Through 2025 every image tool garbled Hebrew. In 2026 it improved but did not go away:
- OpenAI released GPT Image 2 on April 21, 2026 and ChatGPT Images 2.5 on September 8, 2026, both promoted for better text, including non-Latin scripts. OpenAI's announcements name scripts such as Japanese, Chinese and Hindi; they do not single out Hebrew.
- Members' experience matches that: a short title, date or name often comes out right, but longer Hebrew still breaks. In September 2026 the advice in the group was still to generate the art without lettering and add the text in Canva. In March 2026 a member found the Hebrew letters garbled in a video made by NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook).
- Watch the content too, not only the letters. A member warned in October 2026 that AI Torah graphics sometimes put a cross on the crown of a Sefer Torah. AI pictures of Shabbos candles tend to show exactly two. In Chabad practice the mother lights at least two, often one more for each child, and each young girl lights her own smaller candle, so check the picture before printing.
Two ways to keep control:
- Strip and replace. Generate the flyer, then ask the model to remove the Hebrew letters, leave empty space, and change nothing else. Type the Hebrew yourself in Canva or Affinity, where you choose the font.
- Background only. Ask for the picture with no text at all, then set all the Hebrew on top.
To get an editable version of an AI flyer, members type @canva in ChatGPT after connecting Canva, or upload the image to Canva and use Magic Layers; both change the design a little, so proofread every letter (September and October 2026). More in the Hebrew-in-images guide and AI Flyer Aesthetics.
Right-to-left layout and typesetting
For a source sheet, a magazine or a booklet, Word files with mixed Hebrew and English are where formatting goes wrong.
- Ask for LaTeX or Typst instead of a Word file when the layout matters. Claude knows LaTeX well. A shliach built a Haggadah customizer on LaTeX with Hebrew-and-English book skills in 2026.
- Put the rules at the top of the chat and repeat them when it drifts: "Hebrew goes right to left. Do not edit, reorder or 'correct' my Hebrew text."
- For a printable booklet, members had the AI build an HTML page with print styling for 8.5 by 11 paper and pasted the Hebrew from Sefaria (2025).
- Nekudos. To add vowels to Hebrew text, members use Dicta's Nakdan (July 2026) rather than asking a chat tool, which drops or misplaces them.
Reading print, Rashi script and handwriting (OCR)
- Square-letter print. Google Lens, or upload the PDF to Google Drive and open it with Google Docs, handles small jobs. For large jobs members used Google's Document AI; new Google Cloud accounts get a $300 credit for 90 days (details). i2ocr is a free Hebrew OCR page that sometimes beats a chat tool on raw text.
- Two-column pages (Likkutei Sichos, with footnotes mixed in). A direct upload to a chat tool scrambles the order. Fixes members reported: tell the model "two columns, right to left"; split the page image in half and read the right half first; or get plain text from Dach.dev instead of OCR.
- Rashi script. There is still no simple free tool. Dicta has described its Maivin reader as handling Rashi-script prints; check Dicta's site for what is open to the public. Tesseract, the free OCR engine, has a Hebrew model but no Rashi-script model.
- Handwriting (ksav yad). Still the hardest case. Members "tried the basics, none did well" (March 2026). The suggestion that held up was a tool built for historical handwriting such as eScriptorium, which supports Hebrew but takes real setup, and then checking every line by hand (June 2026).
Reading Hebrew aloud (text to speech)
- ElevenLabs. Its Eleven v3 model lists Hebrew among its supported languages; Yiddish is not listed. Eleven v4 is now ElevenLabs' newest model, so check its language list before you switch (ElevenLabs languages page). See ElevenLabs.
- Make it sound Ashkenazi. Write the Hebrew words with nekudos chosen for Ashkenazi vowels, or write them in Ashkenazi transliteration, before the voice reads them.
- Fix the script first. A shliach making short daily Chitas videos found the narration mangled Hebrew words written in English letters. Asking ChatGPT to convert every Hebrew word in the script into Hebrew with nekudos before generating the audio "really made a difference" (October 2026). Add a list of how you pronounce key words.
- The letter ches. Write "kh" ("Khabad", "samayakh"). Members said in July 2026 that "kh usually does the trick" for English voices and for Suno.
Counting, dates and gematria
Language models are bad at counting letters, gematria and Hebrew date conversion, even when the Hebrew is perfect. A member noted in October 2026 that the AI "can't count final chof." Use a tool that calculates instead of guessing: berel.me/gematry for gematria and berel.me/hebrewdate for dates. Hebrew birthdays, zmanim and the after-shkiah problem are on Zmanim and Hebrew Dates.
Still open
- A reliable Rashi-script and handwriting reader that a non-technical shliach can use.
- Yiddish transcription that matches Hebrew quality. A Yiddish transcription and translation app, Yiddish Labs, was shared once in December 2025 and not reviewed in the group since.
- Teaching a phone keyboard's talk-to-text the words "tefillin," "tichel" and "Chabad."
- A Hebrew reading trainer that listens to a child and corrects them. A member asked in August 2026; nothing ready-made was found, and one shliach is building one for his Hebrew school.
What changed in 2026
- Image tools got better at short Hebrew, but members still set long Hebrew by hand (April and September 2026 releases from OpenAI; group advice unchanged in September).
- NotebookLM was renamed Gemini Notebook (members noticed in July 2026).
- Dicta's Nakdan became the group's answer for nekudos, and "convert to vocalized Hebrew first" became the fix for narration.
- Daiah (now at chabad.ai) opened a searchable text library of the Rebbe's Torah; a member found its Hebrew and English toggle confusing until they turned off Chrome's automatic page translation (September 2026).