Multichannel Transcription

If you have a multichannel audio file with multiple speakers, you can transcribe each of them separately.

The response includes an audio_channels property with the number of different channels, and an additional utterances property, containing a list of turn-by-turn utterances.

Each utterance contains channel information, starting at 1.

Additionally, each word in the words array contains the channel identifier.

Quickstart

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import assemblyai as aai
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aai.settings.api_key = "<YOUR_API_KEY>"
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# audio_file = "./local_file.mp3"
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audio_file = "https://assembly.ai/wildfires.mp3"
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config = aai.TranscriptionConfig(multichannel=True)
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transcript = aai.Transcriber(config=config).transcribe(audio_file)
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if transcript.status == "error":
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  raise RuntimeError(f"Transcription failed: {transcript.error}")
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for utterance in transcript.utterances:
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  print(f"Channel {utterance.speaker}: {utterance.text}")

Per-channel diarization

If you have a multichannel audio file where individual channels may contain multiple speakers, you can combine multichannel and speaker_labels to perform diarization within each channel.

When both parameters are enabled:

• Channels are labeled numerically (1, 2, 3, etc.)
• Speakers within each channel are labeled alphabetically (A, B, C, etc.)
• The combined speaker label format is {channel}{speaker} (e.g., “1A”, “1B”, “2A”)

For example, if channel 1 has two speakers and channel 2 has one speaker, the labels would be:

• First speaker on channel 1: 1A
• Second speaker on channel 1: 1B
• First speaker on channel 2: 2A

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import assemblyai as aai
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aai.settings.api_key = "<YOUR_API_KEY>"
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# audio_file = "./local_file.mp3"
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audio_file = "https://assembly.ai/wildfires.mp3"
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config = aai.TranscriptionConfig(multichannel=True,
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                                  speaker_labels=True)
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transcript = aai.Transcriber(config=config).transcribe(audio_file)
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if transcript.status == "error":
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  raise RuntimeError(f"Transcription failed: {transcript.error}")
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for utterance in transcript.utterances:
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  print(f"Speaker {utterance.speaker}: {utterance.text}")