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Speech recognition can be used to create a verbatim transcript of the audio; however, punctuation is essential for coherent documentation. Two optional features are available for this need: Spoken and Automated Punctuation.

Feature availability:


The two parameters, spokenPunctuation and automatedPunctuation are mutually exclusive - when both are set to true, spokenPunctuation will override automatedPunctuation.

Punctuation configuration request parameters

ParameterDescriptionRecommendation
spokenPunctuationEnable users to control when punctuation is inserted in the document output, having punctuation symbols and line breaks added to the document instead of transcribed text, as defined below.Use for dictation and transcription workflows (not available for /stream)
automaticPunctuationASR model automatically inserts limited punctuation (e.g., period, comma, question mark) based on context and dictation cadence.Use for conversational transcript workflows (on by default for /stream)

Spoken Punctuation Support

PunctuationSpoken forms supported
Period.”period”, “full stop”, “dot”
Comma,”comma”
New line\n”new line”, “next line”
New paragraph\n\n”new paragraph”, “next paragraph”
Percent%”percent”, “percent sign”
Exclamation mark!”exclamation mark”, “exclamation point”
Question mark?”question mark”
Colon:”colon”
Semicolon;”semicolon”
Hyphen-”hyphen”, “dash”
Slash/”slash”, “forward slash”
Quotation marks" "”open quote”, “open quotation”
“close quote”, “close quotation”
Parentheses( )”open parenthesis”, “open paren”, “open bracket(s)”
“close parenthesis”, “closed paren”, “close bracket(s)”, “end bracket(s)”

Notice that some punctuation may be supported by more than one utterance. For example, either “open parentheses” and “open paren” can be spoken to return (. There are also some terms (e.g., “colon”) that will be disambiguated by the language model to determine if the symbol or the word should be inserted based on the context.

Don’t Smart Quote Me On That

Some applications provide support for “smart punctuation”: Transformation of plain ASCII characters to look nicer and be more readable in modern text editors. Such smart transformations, however, can cause issues with speech-to-text integrations. See a detailed guide here to learn how to insert and handle these characters appropriately, and prevent unexpected whitespace from being added into your text.
There are some terms (e.g., “colon”) that will be disambiguated by the language model to determine if the symbol or the word should be inserted based on the context.Please contact us to report errors, or for more information on this feature.