Punjabi speech-to-text
Not usableWe sent 30 Punjabi test clips through this API. Whisper Large v3 made 82% 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 | 82% | 43% | 0 of 30 | 0 of 30 | 0.139× 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 | ਧਰਤੀ ਦੀ ਨਦੀਆਂ ਰਾਹੀਂ ਸਮੁੰਦਰਾਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਪਾਏ ਗਏ ਪਾਣੀਂ ਦਾ 20 ਪ੍ਰਤੀਸ਼ਤ ਪਾਣੀ ਅਮੇਜ਼ਨ ਤੋਂ ਆਉਂਦਾ ਹੈ। |
| Whisper Large v3 | ਤਰਤਿਦ ਨਦੀਆ ਰੈ ਸਮੁਂਦਰਾ ਵੀਚ ਪਾਏ ਗਈ ਪਾਣੀ ਦਾ ਵੀ ਪਰਤੀਸ਼ਨ ਪਾਣੀ ਏਮਾ ਜੋਨ ਤੋ ਅਨਦਾ ਹੈ. |
Language detection
All 10 clips we sent without a language field were identified as Punjabi. Auto-detection is safe here; sending language=pa still skips the detection step.
What to do instead
We would rather you know this before you build than after. For Punjabi, 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 Punjabi from Hugging Face run on your own hardware. If your audio mixes Punjabi 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 Punjabi?
On 30 clean read-speech clips it made 82% 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 Punjabi?
In our test, yes: all 10 clips sent without a language were identified as Punjabi. Sending language=pa still saves the detection step on every request.
Can it translate Punjabi speech to English?
The API returns Punjabi 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.