Language hints

Overview

Soniox Speech-to-Text AI is a powerful, multilingual model that transcribes speech in 60+ languages with world-leading accuracy.

By default, you don’t need to pre-select a language — the model automatically detects and transcribes any supported language. It also handles multilingual speech seamlessly, even when multiple languages are mixed within a single sentence or conversation.

When you already know which languages are most likely to appear in your audio, you should provide language hints to guide the model. This improves accuracy by biasing recognition toward the specified languages, while still allowing other languages to be detected if present.

How language hints work

• Use the language_hints parameter to provide a list of expected ISO language codes (e.g., en for English, es for Spanish).
• Language hints do not restrict recognition to those languages — they only bias the model toward them.

Example: Hinting English and Spanish

{
  "language_hints": ["en", "es"]
}

This biases transcription toward English and Spanish, while still allowing other languages to be detected if spoken.

When to use language hints

Provide language_hints when:

• You know or expect certain languages in the audio.
• You want to improve accuracy for specific languages.
• Audio includes uncommon or similar-sounding languages.
• You’re transcribing content for a specific audience or market.

Supported languages

See the list of supported languages and their ISO codes.