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ElevenLabs<\/a>, an AI startup that just raised a $180 million mega funding round<\/a>, has been primarily known for its audio generation prowess. The company took a step in another technological direction by launching its first standalone speech-to-text model called Scribe.<\/p>\n The startup, valued at $3.3 billion<\/a>, has aided many other companies in providing speech-to-text services through its vast library of voices. However, the company is now looking to get into speech detection and compete with the likes of Gladia<\/a>, Speechmatics<\/a>, AssemblyAI<\/a>, Deepgram<\/a>, and OpenAI\u2019s Whisper models.<\/p>\n ElevenLabs\u2019 Scribe model supports over 99 languages at launch. The company categorizes over 25 languages in excellent accuracy category for the model where the word error rate is less than 5%. This list includes English (claimed accuracy rate of 97%), French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Other languages are ranked in different categories with high (5-10% word error rate), good (10 to 20% word error rate), and moderate (25 to 50%) word error rates.<\/p>\n The company said that the model outperformed Google Gemini 2.0 Flash and Whisper Large V3 across multiple languages in FLEURS & Common Voice benchmark tests.<\/p>\n ElevenLabs had developed the speech-to-text component for its AI conversational agent platform, which was released last year. However, this is the first time the company is releasing a standalone speech detection model<\/a>. In a conversation with TechCrunch last month, CEO Mati Staniszewski talked about improving speech detection models.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to understand what\u2019s being said by you in a conversation better. We are working on ways to move away from only generating content and understanding and transcribing speech,\u201d Staniszewski said at that time. \u201cMany people say that speech-to-text is a solved problem. But for many languages, it is pretty bad. We think we can build better speech detection models because we have in-house teams to annotate data and give us quick feedback.\u201d<\/p>\n The model also has smart speaker diarization to tell you who is speaking, timestamp at word level for accurate subtitles, and auto-tagging sound events like audience laughters. The startup is providing a way for customers to directly transcribe video content to add subtitles or captions in its studio.<\/p>\n Scribe currently only works with pre-recorded audio formats. The company said it will release a low-latency real-time version of the model soon. That means it is not yet effective for meeting transcriptions or voice note-taking.<\/p>\n ElevenLabs is pricing Scribe at $0.40 for an hour of transcribed audio. While the rate is competitive, some of its rivals<\/a> offer a lower price<\/a> for audio transcriptions at the moment with some feature differentiation. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n