Maltese speech-to-text
Not usableWe sent 30 Maltese test clips through this API. Whisper Large v3 made 72% 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 | 72% | 21% | 0 of 30 | 0 of 30 | 0.065× real time |
Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 | 22% | 7.5% | 0 of 30 | 0 of 30 | 0.041× 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 | Ovvjament hemm spjegazzjonijiet teoloġiċi Kristjani għal din it-tradizzjoni, iżda jista' jkun ukoll ritwal tar-rebbiegħa u l-fertilità ta' qabel l-Insara. |
| Whisper Large v3 | Ovvijament, għab spiegazzjoni teologiċi kristjani għal din tradizzjoni, iżdajn saj kunu kwall il-rituata rrabbija u l-fertilitat għab bellenzare. |
| Parakeet (its median clip) | Spoken: Wara li seħħ l-inċident, Gibson kien ittrasportat lejn sptar imma miet ftit wara. Wara li seħħ l-inċident, Gibson kien ittrasportat fl-Isptar imma miet fd wara. |
Language detection
All 10 clips we sent without a language field were identified as Maltese. Auto-detection is safe here; sending language=mt still skips the detection step.
What to do instead
We would rather you know this before you build than after. For Maltese, 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 Maltese from Hugging Face run on your own hardware. If your audio mixes Maltese 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 Maltese?
On 30 clean read-speech clips it made 72% 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 Maltese?
In our test, yes: all 10 clips sent without a language were identified as Maltese. Sending language=mt still saves the detection step on every request.
Whisper or Parakeet for Maltese?
On the same clips Whisper Large v3 scored 72% and Parakeet 22%. Parakeet was more accurate here and is also the faster model, so start with it. Both cost $0.002 per minute.
Can it translate Maltese speech to English?
The API returns Maltese 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.