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Gladia can automatically detect the spoken language from audio, either within a candidate set you provide or across all supported languages.
Provide a small list of likely languages when possible. It improves accuracy and reduces latency.

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How to use language detection ?

  • You know the language of the audio ahead of time.
  • The audio is monolingual (single language throughout).
  • You want the fastest, most accurate results.

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When to use auto-detection

  • You process audio in many different languages and don’t know which one beforehand.
  • You want Gladia to pick the language automatically.

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How to use language detection

You can either omit language_config.languages (or pass an empty list) to search across all supported languages, or pass a constrained list:
The detected language is returned on each utterance and can vary over time if you also enable code switching.
When code_switching is false and no language is set, the language is detected on the first utterance and reused for the rest of the session or file. If the beginning of your audio contains silence, music, or a different language than the main content, this can lead to incorrect detection for the whole transcription.
Even when using auto-detection, pass a small list of likely languages in languages to constrain the search. This improves both accuracy and processing time.

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Tips

  • Use supported languages to pick valid ISO 639-1 codes.
  • Combine with messages_config.receive_partial_transcripts in real time to get immediate feedback.
  • For mixed-language conversations, enable code switching.