More than 12,000 university jobs lost across UK
More than 12,000 university jobs have been cut across the UK in the past year, according to new analysis from the University and College Union (UCU), ...
AI startup ElevenLabs, known for its cutting-edge audio-generation technology, has unveiled its first stand-alone speech-to-text model, named Scribe.
The company, fresh off a $180 million funding round and valued at $3.3 billion, is now expanding its technology portfolio to compete in the speech detection arena.
Scribe supports over 99 languages at launch, with more than 25 languages achieving an “excellent” accuracy rating—defined as a word error rate of less than 5%. This list includes English, with a claimed accuracy rate of 97%, as well as French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Other languages are categorized into high, good, and moderate accuracy levels based on their word error rates.
According to benchmark tests using FLEURS and Common Voice datasets, Scribe has outperformed competitors such as Google Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI’s Whisper Large V3 across multiple languages. Previously, ElevenLabs developed a speech-to-text component for its AI conversational agent platform, but Scribe marks the first time the company is releasing a dedicated, stand-alone speech detection model.
CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch last month, “We want to understand what’s 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.” He noted that while many consider speech-to-text a solved problem, performance for many languages remains suboptimal. “We think we can build better speech detection models because we have in-house teams to annotate data and give us quick feedback,” Staniszewski added.
In addition to accurate transcription, Scribe incorporates smart speaker diarization to identify who is speaking, provides word-level timestamps for precise subtitle generation, and auto-tags sound events such as audience laughter. The model currently processes pre-recorded audio formats, and ElevenLabs plans to release a low-latency real-time version in the near future, which would extend its use to meeting transcriptions and live voice note-taking.
Scribe is priced competitively at $0.40 per hour of transcribed audio, although some rival services offer lower prices with different feature sets. As ElevenLabs continues to push the boundaries of generative AI technology, the launch of Scribe marks another significant step in expanding its influence across both audio-generation and speech detection markets.
Video from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) showed on Friday (19 September) the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii erupting and spewing lava.
At least eight people have died and more than 90 others were injured following a catastrophic gas tanker explosion on a major highway in Mexico City’s Iztapalapa district on Wednesday, authorities confirmed.
At least 69 people have died and almost 150 injured following a powerful 6.9-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Cebu City in the central Visayas region of the Philippines, officials said, making it one of the country’s deadliest disasters this year.
Authorities in California have identified the dismembered body discovered in a Tesla registered to singer D4vd as 15-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, who had been missing from Lake Elsinore since April 2024.
A powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on 13 September with no tsunami threat, coming just weeks after the region endured a devastating 8.8-magnitude quake — the strongest since 1952.
From Sunday, all non-EU citizens, including British visitors, will face new biometric checks when entering and exiting the European Union under its long-delayed Entry/Exit System (EES).
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi of the University of California.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for their groundbreaking discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in electric circuits.
United States chipmaker AMD will supply artificial intelligence chips to OpenAI in a multi-year agreement that could generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and give the ChatGPT maker the option to acquire up to 10% of the company.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 has been awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their ground breaking discoveries on peripheral immune tolerance.
You can download the AnewZ application from Play Store and the App Store.
What is your opinion on this topic?
Leave the first comment