Multilingual Transcription

You may find yourself with customers that speak in more than one language ("code switch") in a single meeting. This requires a special configuration to produce an accurate transcript, since standard transcription configurations will interpret the entire conversation as taking place in a single language. Some of our supported transcription providers offer code switching configurations in order to handle these situations.

Code switching is supported for both async and real-time models, but quality will generally be higher for async models, so we recommend using them unless you require transcription data in real time.

Transcription providers that support code-switching

To get started with using any of these providers, you'll need to sign up for an account, get an API key, and add it to the Recall transcription dashboard.

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View the Transcription Dashboard

(US) us-east-1 (Pay-as-you-go) us-west-2 (EU) eu-central-1 (JP) ap-northeast-1

Real-time transcription code-switching configs

The following is a list of parameters you can add to your Create Bot request to enable real-time multilingual transcription. Note: some transcription providers are only supported for meeting bots. For an up-to-date list of supported providers, see this page.

Deepgram

{
  "meeting_url": "...",
  "transcription_options": {
    "provider": "deepgram",
    "deepgram": {
      "language": "multi"
    }
  }
}

Gladia

{
  "meeting_url": "...",
  "transcription_options": {
    "provider": "gladia_v2",
    "gladia_v2": {
      "language_config": { "code_switching": true }
    }
  }
}

Speechmatics

{
  "meeting_url": "...",
  "transcription_options": {
    "provider": "speechmatics",
    "speechmatics": {
      "language": "cmn_en"   // example: Mandarin↔English bilingual model
    }
  }
}

AWS Transcribe

{
  "meeting_url": "...",
  "transcription_options": {
    "provider": "aws_transcribe",
    "aws_transcribe": {
      "language_identification": true,
      "language_options": ["en-US", "es-US"],  // one dialect per language
      "preferred_language": "en-US"
    }
  }
}

Async transcription code-switching configs

The following is a list of parameters you can add to your Analyze Bot Media request to enable async multilingual transcription.

Deepgram

{
  "deepgram_async_transcription": {
    "language": "multi"
  }
}

Gladia

{
  "gladia_v2_async_transcription": {
    "language_config": { "code_switching": true }
  }
}

Speechmatics

{
  "speechmatics_async_transcription": {
    "language": "cmn_en" // example: Mandarin↔English bilingual model
  }
}

AssemblyAI

{
  "assemblyai_async_transcription": {
    "speech_model": "universal",
    "language_code": "es" // set the non-English language (e.g., "es" for Spanish, "de" for German)
  }
}

FAQ

What languages are supported by each provider?

Transcription providers are constantly updating and adding support for more languages, so the most reliable source of information is their own documentation .