Product improvements

AssemblyAI is now officially PCI Compliant. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Requirements and Security Assessment Procedures (PCI DSS) certification is a rigorous assessment that ensures card holder data is being properly and securely handled and stored. You can read more about PCI DSS here.

Additionally, organizations which have signed an NDA can go to our Trust Portal in order to view our PCI attestation of compliance, as well as other security-related documents.

AssemblyAI is also GDPR Compliant. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is regulation regarding privacy and security for the European Union that applies to businesses that serve customers within the EU. You can read more about GDPR here.

Additionally, organizations which have signed an NDA can go to our Trust Portal in order to view our GDPR assessment on compliance, as well as other security-related documents.

Users of our API can now view and download their self-serve invoices in their dashboards under Billing > Your invoices.

We’ve made readability improvements to the formatting of utterances for dual-channel transcription by combining sequential utterances from the same channel.

We’ve added a patch to improve stability in turnaround times for our async transcription and LeMUR services.

We’ve fixed an issue in which timestamp accuracy would be degraded in certain edge cases when using our async transcription service.

Last week we released Universal-1, a state-of-the-art multimodal speech recognition model. Universal-1 is trained on 12.5M hours of multilingual audio data, yielding impressive performance across the four key languages for which it was trained - English, Spanish, German, and French.

Universal-1 is now the default model for English and Spanish audio files sent to our v2/transcript endpoint for async processing, while German and French will be rolled out in the coming weeks.

You can read more about Universal-1 in our announcement blog or research blog, or you can try it out now on our Playground.

We’ve added a new message type to our Streaming Speech-to-Text (STT) service. This new message type SessionInformation is sent immediately before the final SessionTerminated message when closing a Streaming session, and it contains a field called audio_duration_seconds which contains the total audio duration processed during the session. This feature allows customers to run end-user-specific billing calculations.

To enable this feature, set the enable_extra_session_information query parameter to true when connecting to a Streaming WebSocket.

endpoint_str = 'wss://api.assemblyai.com
/v2/realtime/ws?sample_rate=8000&enable_extra_session_information=true'

This feature will be rolled out in our SDKs soon.

We’ve added a new feature to our Streaming STT service, allowing users to disable Partial Transcripts in a Streaming session. Our Streaming API sends two types of transcripts - Partial Transcripts (unformatted and unpunctuated) that gradually build up the current utterance, and Final Transcripts which are sent when an utterance is complete, containing the entire utterance punctuated and formatted.

Users can now set the disable_partial_transcripts query parameter to true when connecting to a Streaming WebSocket to disable the sending of Partial Transcript messages.

endpoint_str = 'wss://api.assemblyai.com
/v2/realtime/ws?sample_rate=8000&disable_partial_transcripts=true'

This feature will be rolled out in our SDKs soon.

We have fixed a bug in our async transcription service, eliminating File does not appear to contain audio errors. Previously, this error would be surfaced in edge cases where our transcoding pipeline would not have enough resources to transcode a given file, thus failing due to resource starvation.

We’ve made improvements to how utterances are handled during dual-channel transcription. In particular, the transcription service now has elevated sensitivity when detecting utterances, leading to improved utterance insertions when there is overlapping speech on the two channels.