Bengali speech-to-text
Not usableWe sent 30 Bengali test clips through this API. Whisper Large v3 made 73% word errors, which is not good enough to read as a transcript. This page shows what came back so you can judge for yourself.
Measured accuracy
| Model | Word error rate | Character error rate | Clips with no errors | Empty transcripts | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Whisper Large v3openai/whisper-large-v3 | 73% | 39% | 0 of 30 | 0 of 30 | 0.191× real time |
Not usable. Most words come out wrong. Do not build on it for this language. The clips are clean, single-speaker read speech, so treat this as a best case for your own recordings. How we measured, and all 83 languages.
What a transcript looks like
The clip with the median error rate from the test, reference text against what the API returned.
| Spoken | যারা রাজ্যে কাজ করেন তাদের কাছে ইটালীয় প্রতিদিনের ব্যবহারিক ভাষা এবং লাতিন প্রায়শই ধর্মীয় অনুষ্ঠানগুলিতে ব্যবহৃত হয়। |
| Whisper Large v3 | জারা রাজ্যে কাস করেন তাদের কাসে ইটালিও প্রতিডিনের বেভারেক ভাশা এবং লাতিন প্রাইশোই ধরমিয় অনুষ্ঠান গুলিতে বেভায় ত |
Language detection
All 10 clips we sent without a language field were identified as Bengali. Auto-detection is safe here; sending language=bn still skips the detection step.
What to do instead
We would rather you know this before you build than after. For Bengali, look at services that train specifically on the language, such as Google Cloud Speech-to-Text or Azure AI Speech, both of which publish their language lists, or a Whisper checkpoint fine-tuned on Bengali from Hugging Face run on your own hardware. If your audio mixes Bengali with a well-supported language, the well-supported parts will still transcribe. You can confirm all of this on your own audio with the free credit on a new account: transcription playground.
FAQ
How accurate is Whisper for Bengali?
On 30 clean read-speech clips it made 73% word errors. Most words come out wrong. Do not build on it for this language. Real recordings with noise, accents or several speakers will score worse.
Does language auto-detection work for Bengali?
In our test, yes: all 10 clips sent without a language were identified as Bengali. Sending language=bn still saves the detection step on every request.
Can it translate Bengali speech to English?
The API returns Bengali text. For English, transcribe first and translate the text with a chat model on the same key; with accuracy this low the translation will inherit the errors.