Hiring across borders
A company headquartered in Amsterdam interviewing for an EMEA support role might receive responses in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, and Polish in the same week. Without transcription, reviewing across that mix is impractical. With it, every interview becomes searchable, comparable, and accessible to reviewers who don't speak every candidate's first language.
How AI Transcription Works
Step 1: Audio Extraction
When a candidate submits a video or audio response, the platform extracts the audio track. This raw audio is pre-processed to normalise volume levels, reduce background noise, and optimise for speech recognition.
Step 2: Language Detection
Modern speech recognition models can automatically detect the spoken language from the first few seconds of audio. This is critical for platforms serving multilingual teams, as it eliminates the need for manual language selection.
Step 3: Speech-to-Text Conversion
The core transcription engine uses deep learning models (typically transformer-based architectures) trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech data per language. These models convert spoken words into text with high accuracy. For major languages like English, German, French, and Spanish, accuracy rates exceed 95%. For less common languages, accuracy typically ranges from 85 to 93%.
Step 4: Post-Processing
Raw transcriptions are refined with:
- Punctuation insertion: Adding periods, commas, and question marks based on speech patterns
- Capitalisation: Proper nouns, sentence starts
- Speaker diarisation: Identifying different speakers (relevant for panel discussions)
- Timestamp alignment: Linking transcript segments to specific moments in the video for easy navigation
Why 40+ Languages Changes the Game
For Hiring Managers
- Review candidates in any language: Even if you do not speak the candidate’s language, the transcript makes their response accessible.
- Search across responses: Search for specific keywords, competencies, or technical terms across all candidates, in any language.
- Faster review: Reading a transcript is faster than watching a video. Use transcripts for initial scanning, then watch the video for shortlisted candidates.
For Candidates
- Respond in their strongest language: Candidates can choose the language they are most comfortable in, reducing language anxiety and producing more authentic responses.
- Fairer assessment: Evaluating content quality rather than English fluency (unless English is a job requirement) leads to fairer, more diverse hiring.
For Compliance
- Documentation: Transcripts provide a written record of every interview, supporting audit trails and discrimination defence.
- SAR fulfilment: Transcripts are easily included in Subject Access Request data packages, alongside video recordings.
Accuracy Factors
Transcription accuracy depends on:
- Audio quality: Clear microphone audio produces better results than laptop speakers in a noisy room
- Speech clarity: Clear articulation transcribes better than mumbled speech
- Accents: Modern models handle a wide range of accents, but thick regional accents may reduce accuracy slightly
- Technical vocabulary: Domain-specific terms (medical, legal, engineering) may require custom vocabulary support
Languages Supported
StormInterview supports AI transcription in 40+ languages including: English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Farsi, Bengali, Tamil, and more.
StormInterview: transcription in every plan
AI transcription is in every StormInterview plan at EUR 79/month, not gated to a premium tier. Pair with six question types, EU hosting, and GDPR tooling for a complete hiring stack.