Release Notes
This page documents production updates to Batch SaaS, including the trial environment. This page contains information about new or updated features, bug fixes, known issues, and deprecated functionality.
- Language vocabulary improvements for Latvian (lv), Swedish (sv), Hungarian (hu), Portuguese (pt), Polish (pl), Mandarin Chinese (cmn), Arabic (ar), Dutch (nl), Slovak (sk), Bulgarian (bg), Romanian (ro), Slovenian (sl), Lithuanian (It), Croatian (hr), Malay (ms), Catalan (ca), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Greek (el), Turkish (tr)
- Improved formatting of numeric entities such as dates, currencies and large numbers for Swedish (sv), Norwegian (no), and Dutch (nl). Refer to documentation here for more information about Entities and supported languages
- The JSON-v2 output version is now 2.8
- Word and sentence delimiters added to transcription results. This helps produce well-formed text output by accounting for language-specific syntax rules and punctuation placement. Refer to documentation here for more details
- Additional language pack information added to transcription metadata. This gives more detailed information of the specific language, such as writing direction and the delimiter used to split words. Refer to documentation here for more details
- 14 new languages: Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Esperanto, Estonian, Galician, Interlingua, Marathi, Mongolian, Tamil, Thai, Uyghur, Vietnamese, and Welsh
- Resolved an issue where the French word où (where) is recoginsed as ou (or)
- New Batch SaaS environments EU2 (eu2.asr.api.speechmatics.com) and US2 (us2.asr.api.speechmatics.com) available in EU and US regions respectively. Refer to documentation here for more details
- New egress IP addresses to allow notifications for new EU2 and US2 environments. Refer to documentation here for more details
- New English finance domain language pack. Provides accuracy improvements when specific financial jargon is spoken in your audio. Refer to documentation here for more details
- 16 Languages updated with additional punctuation marks for improved readability
- The following languages now support (. ? , !): Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Korean
- Improved accuracy for French, including more data for Canadian French (fr-ca)
- Improved accuracy for Portuguese, including more data for Brazilian Portuguese (pt-br)
- Standard operating point improved accuracy for Romanian, Hungarian, Danish, Slovakian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Slovenian, Lithuanian
- Updated Danish, Norwegian and Swedish to remove undesired character sets
- Improved accuracy in localised spelling for English output locale feature
- Fixes for English and Italian written form numeric entities
- Improved accuracy of percentage symbol recognition in French
- New parameter added for controlling Speaker Diarization sensitivity:
speaker_sensitivity. Refer to our documentation here for more details
- New Ukrainian (uk) language pack
- Resolved an issue where a small number of files with multiple audio channels were mistakenly detected as containing inverted audio, which lead to no transcription being returned. The check for inverted audio is now more robust.
- Resolves an issue where Profanity and Disfluency Tagging were not output when Speaker Diarization was enabled
- Improved accuracy for all 31 language packs. Gains will be for both standard and enhanced operating points
- Biggest gains: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Lithuanian and Turkish
- New Cantonese (yue) and Indonesian (id) language packs
- Improved formatting of numeric entities such as dates, currencies and large numbers for 10 languages (cmn, de, en, es, fr, hi, it, ja, pt, ru, yue). Additional metadata about these entities can be requested by using the new
enable_entities config parameter. For more information please see our documentation here
- Improvements to speaker diarization functionality in scenarios where two speakers are labelled when it is only a single speaker
- Improvements to custom dictionary functionality. Custom dictionary entries should now have less false positives
- Languages updated with additional punctuation marks
- Japanese (。 、)
- Italian (. ? , !)
- Portuguese (. ? , !)
- Russian (. ? , !)
- Mandarin (。 ？ ！ 、)
- Hindi (। ? , !)
- The JSON-v2 output version is now 2.7
- Non-breaking spaces are now possible in a single word
- Speaker Diarization sensitivity parameters (previously deprecated in March 2021) are now removed from the API
- Jobs will now be rejected if these parameters are included in the job config
- This includes
speaker_diarization_params, new_speaker_sensitivity, segment_boundary_sensitivity
- New usage resource allowing you to retrieve details of your Batch SaaS usage
- Option to cancel and delete a running job
- Updated IP address allowlist
- Enhanced model available for all 31 language packs
- Please contact your account manager if you would like access to the enhanced model
- General improvements in pop culture terms recognition for the English language pack
- Removal of foreign characters from English and German language packs
- New language packs for all 31 language model. By default a language pack will contain a standard and enhanced model for all 31 languages. The standard model is now available to use, with no user change required. The enhanced model will be released in September. Please see the API how-to guide for how to request the enhanced model to prepare your integration in advance
- Profanity tagging in Italian and Spanish
- The Chinese Mandarin language pack now supports Traditional as well as Simplified Mandarin. Please see 'Configuring the Job Request' for guidelines of how to do so.
- Error information added in API response for Fetch URL and Notification failures
- Improved speaker diarization
- Speaker diarization has been completely re-designed internally and should now be significantly more accurate
- Instead of gendered speaker labels (M1, F2) speaker labels will be now (S1, S2 etc.) in the
json-v2 and txt output. Speaker gender identification is no longer a supported feature
- If requesting an output in
txt format, and requesting no diarization, there will be no Speaker:UU at the start of a transcript
- Users may still request speaker diarization as before via the configuration object
- Beta sensitivity parameters will be removed. The parameters will remain within the API but will not have any effect
- This update to speaker diarization feature can mean the turnaround time for your transcript will in some cases take longer
- Improved Swedish and Arabic language packs, both now have advanced punctuation enabled (Swedish supports . ? , ! and Arabic supports . ؟ ، !)
- For the English language pack only, a new tag,
[disfluency] has been added to a pre-set list of words that imply hesitation or interjection in the JSON-v2 output only. Examples include 'hmm' and 'umm'. Customers may use this tag to carry out their own post-processing
- The json-v2 API schema has been updated to v2.6
| Issue ID | Summary | Detailed Description and Possible Workarounds |
|---|
| REQ-20261 | The Japanese language pack may output fewer punctuation marks in certain scenarios | In some cases, users may see a decreased output in punctuation marks when transcribing in Japanese. Please report this if this is the case |
To help customers comply with data protection obligations from GDPR and other regulations, we assume that all media, transcript, and configuration files processed by the Speechmatics Batch SaaS may contain personal data. Media, transcript, and configuration data are only processed to perform automated speech transcription following customer instructions conveyed via the cloud API.
All media, transcript, and configuration data will not be stored any longer than 7 days, and after this period they are deleted. This process will occur unless a user has explicitly deleted them through the API before they are deleted automatically. GET & DELETE request for jobs and/or media files more than 7 days after their submission or that have already been deleted will return a 4xx response.
Beyond the 7 day window, logs will still be present for troubleshooting and support purposes identifying whether features such as Custom Dictionary have been used but no information of its contents will be available.
Any URLs provided by users within the job config relating to fetching media or for notifications on the job are not recorded by logs. However, the client IP addresses are recorded.