Transcription Accuracy

Background noise, echo, and a distant microphone are the most common causes of garbled text. Kalima offers two capture quality modes:

• Enhanced mode turns on echo cancellation, noise suppression, and auto-gain. It is the default and helps a lot with a laptop mic or in loud or echoey spaces.
• Raw mode records unprocessed audio and is best with a good microphone in a quiet room.

If your transcript is garbled, check that the quality mode matches the room you are actually in. Enhanced is the safer choice for almost every room. You can compare both on a sample with the Test modes option in the audio settings. Also move closer to the microphone and keep a consistent distance. See Audio Sources & Quality for the full breakdown.

Kalima detects language automatically, but detection is guided, not forced, it can stumble on accents, short phrases, or languages that sound similar. The fix is to add expected-language hints.

In the setup wizard's Languages step (or your session settings), search for and add each language you expect to be spoken. This steers recognition toward those languages without locking others out, so mid-conversation switches still work. Adding at least one hint noticeably improves results when you already know what will be spoken.

The picker offers about 60 languages, and you can add more than one. Learn more in Languages & Detection.

Generic recognition often misses people's names, company and product names, medical or legal terms, and other jargon. Give Kalima that vocabulary ahead of time with session context.

Open the session context dialog (or the Context step in setup) and add a short description of the session plus the specific terms and names you expect. This boosts recognition of exactly those words. The quick-description field holds up to 2,000 characters, but keep it concise, very long backgrounds have diminishing returns. You can also save reusable context templates for recurring meeting types. Full guidance is in Improve Accuracy with Context.

Kalima separates speakers automatically (Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on), but overlapping or very short speech is the hardest case for any engine, so it may occasionally misattribute a line. To reduce this:

• Encourage one person to speak at a time, cross-talk is the main cause of mixed-up attribution.
• Make sure each speaker is clearly audible to the microphone.

Once recording stops you can rename speakers to real names, and the numbering stays consistent across every take in the session. See Speakers & Diarization.

If you sit far from the microphone or use a quiet lapel mic, the engine may not hear you clearly. Adjust the recording gain before you record: open the gain settings (the gear next to the audio source) and boost or cut the level. The range runs from -12 dB to +12 dB in 1 dB steps, default 0, and your setting is remembered for next time. Nudge it up for quiet mics and down for hot, distorted input.

This is expected and not an accuracy problem. Live transcription shows a fast preliminary result first, then refines it into the confirmed version a moment later. Confirmed text can trail the live audio by up to about 2 seconds while the engine finishes each phrase. This brief delay actually improves the final wording by avoiding choppy, over-segmented results.

Kalima shows how confident the engine is in each word using subtle opacity, fainter words indicate lower confidence and are worth a second look. Treat it as a proofreading hint, not a guarantee. Faint words clustered together usually point to a noisy stretch of audio; use the fixes above (quality mode, mic distance, gain) for the next recording, and clean up the current transcript with AutoCorrect+ (below).

Kalima captures audio from the moment you press record and buffers it, so the brief window before the connection completes is minimized. If you still notice clipped opening words, pause for about half a second after pressing record before you start speaking.