Forced alignment with Cue: Character-level audio timing

ElevenLabs introduces Cue, a forced-alignment model that precisely maps every character in an audio recording to its timing, improving synchronization for transcripts, subtitles, dubbing, and lyric displays. Used in every request to the company’s Scribe speech-to-text models and available through a Forced Alignment API, Cue supports more than 90 languages and can process audio files of any length in a single pass, avoiding accumulated errors caused by chunking long recordings. ElevenLabs reports that Cue outperformed tested open-source aligners across 29 benchmark languages, with lower timing errors on long and noisy recordings and the ability to align an hour of audio in roughly half a second on production hardware. The model is smaller than ElevenLabs’ previous aligner but is designed for real-world audio conditions such as background noise, overlapping speakers, and music, and its character-level approach offers finer precision than standard word-level benchmarks measure. Cue also showed strong performance on multilingual songs, aligning lyrics more accurately than competing tools in tests, while rapid updates following user feedback helped improve support for lower-resource languages.

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