Tamil speech-to-text
Not usableWe sent 30 Tamil 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% | 56% | 0 of 30 | 10 of 30 | 0.172× 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 | அதன் பலனாக, நடிகர்களும் கூட மேடையின் மீது கஞ்சாவை புகைக்கிறார்கள், மற்றும் தியேட்டரும் கூட பார்வையாளர்களை அதில் இணைய உற்சாகப்படுத்துகிறது. |
| Whisper Large v3 | ஆதன் பலன் நடிகர்களும் மேடையின் மீது கஞ்சாவை புகிக்கிறார்கள் மற்றும் தேட்டரும் பார்வியார்கள் அதில் இனையே உரிச்சாகப்படுத்திகிறது. |
Language detection
Send language=ta. Of 10 clips sent without it, 9 were identified as Tamil; the others were labelled Telugu (1). When detection is wrong, Whisper writes the transcript in the language it guessed.
What to do instead
We would rather you know this before you build than after. For Tamil, 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 Tamil from Hugging Face run on your own hardware. If your audio mixes Tamil 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 Tamil?
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 Tamil?
Mostly. Of 10 clips sent without a language, 9 were identified as Tamil; the rest were labelled Telugu (1). A wrong label means the transcript is written in the wrong language, so always send language=ta.
Can it translate Tamil speech to English?
The API returns Tamil 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: Malayalam (over 100%) · Telugu (70%) · Kannada (70%)