What is Multilingual Transcription

Multilingual transcription is a technology that converts speech spoken in multiple languages into written text. AI-based Speech to Text (STT) systems automatically detect the language contained in the audio, and can either transcribe it as-is or translate it into a specific language to provide a unified result.

The use of multilingual STT is growing in global conferences, customer support, meetings, financial records, and more. Accurate transcription results serve as the starting point for subtitle and dubbing production, turn voice data into searchable internal knowledge, and are also used to build audit records in regulated industries.

Key features are as follows.

• Automatic language detection: identifies languages even when a single audio file contains multiple languages.
• Speaker diarization: distinguishes speech by speaker.
• Keyterm prompting: improves transcription quality by specifying particular terms.
• Entity detection: identifies key entities that appear in the speech.
• API integration: allows developers to connect the Speech to Text API into complex multilingual transcription pipelines.

ElevenLabs' Scribe v2 supports multilingual STT features and automatic language detection. Specifying the language directly can improve performance, and the ElevenAPI's language_code parameter uses automatic prediction by default.

Automatic transcription has advantages in speed and scalability, but human review may be more suitable for complex audio where multiple people speak at the same time. Transcription accuracy is measured by Word Error Rate (WER), and results can vary by language.