You heard a beautiful Quran recitation on TikTok, in the masjid, or on someone else's car radio, and you want to know two things: which verse is this, and who is reciting. Google cannot answer that. Neither can Shazam. It is trained on commercial music, not Quran audio. Until recently, your only option was to ask in a WhatsApp group and hope someone recognised the voice.
That is the gap RecitID fills. It listens to a short clip of Quran recitation and tells you the surah, the verse, the translation, and, when we can match the voice, the reciter as well. This post walks through how it actually works and when each of the detection modes is the right tool.
Why Shazam does not work for Quran
Shazam works by fingerprinting a song's spectrogram and matching against a catalogue of commercial releases. Every version of a song, the studio recording, the remix, the live acoustic cover, is a separate record in that catalogue. Match one, and you get the song back.
Quran recitation breaks that model in three ways. First, the same verse is recited by hundreds of different qaris, each with their own melody and pace. The audio fingerprints do not collide the way two copies of one pop song do. Second, the timing is free: a reciter can take four seconds on a short verse or twenty. Third, most recitation never appears on commercial music catalogues at all. Shazam's index simply does not know the content.
You need a different approach: recognise the Arabic text being recited, not the specific waveform. That is the first thing RecitID does.
What RecitID actually identifies
One tap on Detect and we listen for a few seconds. The model transcribes the Arabic you are hearing, matches it against every ayah in the Quran, and returns the location with a confidence score. Here is what comes back:
- Surah and verse: the exact ayah. If the clip spans two verses, we return the range.
- Arabic text: the ayah text with the usual uthmani orthography.
- Translation: your preferred translation, in any of 40 reading languages.
- Reciter: when the voice matches a qari in our reference set of 200+, we return the name alongside the verse.
- Audio playback: tap play to hear the full ayah from one of 48+ world-renowned reciters we license for in-app listening.
The whole thing takes a couple of seconds on a decent connection. If you want it to run continuously, catching every verse recited during a full taraweeh session or a study halaqa, switch to Auto-Detect. It stays open in the background, surfaces each new verse as it comes, and keeps a running log for the session.
Identifying the reciter, not just the verse
Text match answers the easier question. The harder one, whose voice is this?, needs a separate technique. We train a voice model (ECAPA-TDNN) on reference recordings from every reciter in our set, producing a speaker embedding for each qari. When you tap Detect, we compute an embedding for your clip and find the closest match.
Two consequences worth knowing. First, a short, noisy clip may confidently identify the verse but not the voice. Verse match is forgiving of background noise; voice match needs a cleaner signal, roughly four seconds or more of the qari actually reciting without people talking over them. Second, we only return a reciter name when confidence passes a threshold. False positives (Qari A identified as Qari B) are much worse than an honest "we are not sure".
If we are not sure, you still get the verse, the translation, and the option to play the ayah from a known reciter of your choice.
When to use each detection mode
RecitID has three listening modes and they solve different problems.
Detect: single shot
The default. Open the app, tap the mic, get back one verse plus reciter. Use this when you heard a clip and want to know what it was: a voice note a friend sent you, a recitation playing in a café, a video you are scrolling past. Free plan: 7 detections per day. Pro: 50 per day.
Auto-Detect: continuous listening
Runs in the background and catches every verse in a live session. Useful during taraweeh, a long recorded khatm, a study circle, or when you are sitting next to someone reciting aloud for hours. The app keeps the running log even if you close your eyes and doze off. Details on the Auto-Detect page.
Smart Scanner: text and image
Not listening. Reading. Point your camera at a printed mushaf, a screenshot, or an Arabic quote on social media, and RecitID finds the verse, returns the same translation and audio you would get from Detect. Useful when there is no audio to capture: someone quoted an ayah in a caption and you want the context. Smart Scanner page.
Live Khutbah Translation is a separate tool
People sometimes conflate Detect with Live Khutbah Translation. They are different systems. Detect matches Quran audio against the fixed text of the Quran, so it only ever returns verse ranges. Live Khutbah runs on a speech-to-text pipeline tuned for Arabic sermons and produces running translation of the khatib's words, which is mostly not Quran. You want Detect for recitation; you want Live Khutbah for the sermon in between.
Live Khutbah covers 53 languages and is primarily used on Fridays, in real time, with the phone sitting on your lap. The Pro+ plan includes 60 hours a year (boosted to 70 during Ramadan), enough for every jumu'ah and then some.
Privacy: what happens to the audio
Short answer: the clip is sent to our servers for processing, not stored long-term, and the transcript stays on your device unless you choose to save the session. We keep no permanent copy of the raw audio you capture. It is discarded after the verse match completes. For the precise retention windows, including the third-party AI providers we route through, see the Privacy Policy.
If you would rather keep identification entirely local, the voice-match side runs on-device for the embedding step; the text-match side currently requires the server. We are working on a fully on-device path for quiet recitation but it is not shipping yet.
Pricing, limits, and what is actually free
The free plan gets you 7 detections a day and 20 reciter identifications a day, enough to settle an argument or two. If you spend more time listening to Quran than that, the plans work out like this:
- Monthly Pro: $9.99/month. 50 detections/day, 150 reciter IDs/day, 3 hours Live Translation/month, AI Explain Ayah, AI Chat, Smart Scanner.
- Annual Pro+: $59.99/year with a 7-day free trial for new subscribers (saves about 50% vs monthly). 50 detections/day, 200 reciter IDs/day, 60 hours Live Translation/year (70 during Ramadan), plus session save & replay.
- Extra Hours: one-time packs if you burn through your Live Translation quota, pricing shown in-app.
- No ads: the app has never had ads or sponsored content and never will.
All limits reset at midnight UTC, not midnight local time, worth knowing if you are in Makkah for tarawih. Full comparison on the pricing page.
Frequently asked
Does RecitID work if I am humming or reciting myself?
It works on fluent recitation. Your own voice is fine as long as you are reading an actual ayah, not humming a melody. It is not a tajweed grader; if you misread, we will probably still identify the verse but cannot check your makhraj. For tajweed practice, Tajweed Reader is the better tool.
What if the clip is only two seconds long?
Verse match often works on very short clips because the model is matching Arabic phonemes against a fixed corpus. Voice match needs more. Four to six seconds of clean recitation is the comfortable minimum. Below that, expect a verse result with no reciter name.
Which translations are available?
Forty reading translations for Quran detection: English (Saheeh International, Pickthall, Yusuf Ali), French (Hamidullah), Urdu, Turkish, Indonesian, Malay, Bengali, Hausa, Swahili, and more. Live Khutbah covers 53 languages separately because the source text there is spontaneous speech, not fixed ayahs.
Is RecitID available on Android?
Yes. It shipped on iOS first and is now on Google Play as well. See the download page.
How is this different from Quran apps like Muslim Pro or Quran.com?
Those apps let you read the Quran and listen to pre-recorded reciters. RecitID does that too, and adds the identification layer on top. It can tell you which verse and which reciter you are hearing from ambient audio. Full side-by-side comparisons: RecitID vs Quran.com, vs Muslim Pro, vs Tarteel.
Try it
The fastest way to understand what RecitID does is to open a Quran recording on YouTube, play it aloud, and tap Detect. Install from the App Store or Google Play. The free plan is enough to try every mode once.
Related reading: how voice identification actually works, and the 20 most popular Quran reciters.