Hausa speech-to-text
Not usableWe sent 30 Hausa test clips through this API. Whisper Large v3 made 83% 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 | 83% | 23% | 0 of 30 | 0 of 30 | 0.058× 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 | Rage tashin hankali, haka kuma yawan fata na gari da karfin rayuwa zai gabatar. Ko wani mutum na da damar samun kwanciyar hankali da gamsuwa. |
| Whisper Large v3 | Raiye tasha hankani haka kumaia wang fata nagari, lak alfin rayu azi gaba ta. Huwani mutanam na adadamar samu nkwan shir hankani, lagam suwa. |
Language detection
All 10 clips we sent without a language field were identified as Hausa. Auto-detection is safe here; sending language=ha still skips the detection step.
What to do instead
We would rather you know this before you build than after. For Hausa, 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 Hausa from Hugging Face run on your own hardware. If your audio mixes Hausa 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 Hausa?
On 30 clean read-speech clips it made 83% 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 Hausa?
In our test, yes: all 10 clips sent without a language were identified as Hausa. Sending language=ha still saves the detection step on every request.
Can it translate Hausa speech to English?
The API returns Hausa 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.