Inference APIs

Measured accuracy

ModelWord error rateCharacter error rateClips with no errorsEmpty transcriptsSpeed
Whisper Large v3
openai/whisper-large-v3
85%34%0 of 300 of 300.123× 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.

SpokenУг үйлчилгээг тээвэр зуучлалд байнга ашигладаг ба үүнд зугаа цэнгэлийн завь болон алсын дата бүхий экспедицэд дуу хоолойн хэрэгцээ шаардлагатай гарахад ашигладаг.
Whisper Large v3Үг үлчлэгээг Тэррэв зүртэл байна гашгалдог баа Үүнд зугаадсан гэдэн зай болон Алсин датаа бүхээ экспедицияад дуу холойн хэрэгцээ шарлахтай гархад ашгалдог.

Language detection

All 10 clips we sent without a language field were identified as Mongolian. Auto-detection is safe here; sending language=mn still skips the detection step.

What to do instead

We would rather you know this before you build than after. For Mongolian, 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 Mongolian from Hugging Face run on your own hardware. If your audio mixes Mongolian 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 Mongolian?

On 30 clean read-speech clips it made 85% 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 Mongolian?

In our test, yes: all 10 clips sent without a language were identified as Mongolian. Sending language=mn still saves the detection step on every request.

Can it translate Mongolian speech to English?

The API returns Mongolian 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.

Related languages: Kazakh (31%) · Russian (5.8%)