ChabadLabs AI FOR SHLICHUS

Hebrew & Yiddish

Translation, OCR, and language tools for Lashon Kodesh content.

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Three problems collapse into this topic: translation, right-to-left layout, and transcription / OCR. Each has a different best-tool answer.

Translation

Surprise winner for pure Hebrew/Yiddish translation, as of early 2026: Qwen.

After testing eight LLMs:

"Qwen doesn't just give the translation, he also provides the etymology, the root (shoresh), occurrences, and a word-by-word transliteration. It's very practical. He also gives the context of the verse."

Runners-up:

  • Claude, best at Yiddish, which is hard for everyone (Yiddish OCR is harder than Hebrew OCR). A bake-off was run between Opus 4.7, Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash for Yiddish OCR.
  • Gemini Pro, strong on modern Hebrew, integrates with Workspace.

For specifically translating a Yiddish or Hebrew shiur to English: use Sofer.ai for transcription, then any of the above for translation. Sofer.ai is recommended specifically for Yiddish/Hebrew audio.

Transcription

Best per language:

LanguageToolNotes
Hebrew (modern)Sofer.aiBuilt for shiurim; handles mixed Hebrew/English/Yiddish.
Hebrew (modern, free)transcribe.ivrit.aiFree Hebrew-only transcription.
YiddishSofer.ai or WhisperWhisper and Parakeet models do the heavy lifting. About 6/10 quality.
English with Hebrew termsWhisper, MacWhisper, TurboScribeHandles the code-switching reasonably.
Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciationn/aTrick: write the text in Hebrew with nikkud tuned for Ashkenazi sounds; ElevenLabs V3 (current as of early 2026) then pronounces it correctly.

See Transcription for the full tool comparison.

RTL & image-text problems

Through 2025 the rule was blunt: every image-gen model garbled Hebrew, so you generated the visual and set the Hebrew by hand in Canva. As of mid-2026 that has changed. ChatGPT's image model (GPT Image 2) and Nano Banana Pro both render short Hebrew (titles, dates, names) correctly and right-to-left, so for a line or two you can often use the output directly. Verify it, and fall back to Canva when the letters come out wrong or when you need exact typographic control.

Canva (or Affinity) is now mainly for layout control and for long or dense Hebrew, where accuracy still slips. The two workarounds still earn their place there:

  1. Strip-and-replace. Generate the visual, then ask the model to remove the Hebrew letters, leaving placeholders, change nothing else. Type the Hebrew in Canva (or Affinity) where you control the font.
  2. Background-only. Generate the visual background only; compose the Hebrew text on top in Canva.

For typeset documents (magazines, source sheets):

  • Use LaTeX or Typst, not DOCX. Claude knows LaTeX well.
  • Set a golden rule at the top of the chat: "Hebrew goes right-to-left." "Do not edit my Hebrew text." Claude needs reminding to keep sentence order intact.

Hebrew OCR

This remains the rough edge:

  • Rashi script. "I'm trying to run a text through AI, but can't find anything to read Rashi script, is there any rashi script OCR?" Was unresolved as of 2026-05; as of mid-2026, printed Rashi typeface is handled: Dicta's Maivin app and the Tesseract heb_rashi traineddata both read it and convert to square letters. Handwriting (ksav yad) stays the harder open problem, below.
  • Hebrew print (square letters). Decent options exist:
    • Google DocumentAI ($300 free credit on Google Cloud).
    • Google Lens or Google Drive, then "Open in Google Docs."
    • i2ocr.com, free online Hebrew OCR, often better than LLMs for raw text extraction.
  • Likkutei Sichos PDF (two-column, footnotes mixed in). A direct ChatGPT upload is "a disaster." Better path: use Dach.dev or the Anash.org Likkutei Sichos app for plain-text export, then translate.
  • Hebrew handwriting (ksav yad). chabad.mekorotai.dicta.org.il exists but, as of early 2026, is "Nah", not yet reliable.

Text-to-speech in Hebrew / Yiddish

ElevenLabs V3 is the leader (as of early 2026) for reliable ches/chet, ayin, and vav distinctions. Trick: write the input in Ashkenazi transliteration or with strategic nikkud to force the pronunciation.

Suno can produce Hebrew songs but mispronounces them; the trick is to write "Khabad" instead of "Chabad" and "samayakh" instead of "samayach".

Pronunciation hacks

  • Write מחודש with explicit nikkud matched to Ashkenazi vowels.
  • Write Khabad not Chabad for English-speaking TTS engines.
  • Write samayakh not samayach for Suno.

Open questions

  • Rashi-script handwriting OCR (printed typeface now handled; see Hebrew OCR above).
  • Yiddish (versus Hebrew) transcription quality.
  • A custom dictionary for Gboard talk-to-text to learn tefillin, tichel, and Chabad. No fix yet.

Last updated May 2026 · Maintained by Hermes AI Agent