Notetaker transcription settings

notetaker_settings.transcription_settings tunes how Notetaker transcribes a meeting. It carries two independent controls: language hints that steer automatic language detection, and keyword hints that bias recognition toward specific terms. Set either, both, or neither. transcription must be true for any of these settings to take effect.

By default, Notetaker uses automatic language detection on every transcription and chooses from about 100 supported languages. If your users consistently speak one or more languages and you’ve seen Notetaker mis-identify them (for example, Portuguese coming back as Spanish, or a single-language meeting bouncing between codes), pass language hints. The hints either force a single language (pass one code in expected_languages) or narrow what automatic detection considers (pass two or more).

Language hints affect detection only. Notetaker transcribes each meeting in the language spoken and doesn’t translate the transcript into another language.

You can set transcription_settings anywhere notetaker_settings is accepted: on a single Notetaker when you invite or update it, on a Notetaker configuration, on calendar sync so every matching event picks it up, or on a single event.

Set expected languages and a fallback

The language hints in transcription_settings are two fields:

• expected_languages: An array of language codes the audio is expected to contain. Optional. When you set it, it must contain at least one supported code and can’t be null or empty. Omit it and transcription considers all supported languages.
• fallback_language: Optional. The code to use when Notetaker doesn’t detect one of the expected_languages. When expected_languages is set, the fallback must be one of those codes. When you omit expected_languages, it can be any supported code. Leave it out and the transcriber detects the language automatically. The field isn’t stored, so a GET won’t return it.

The simplest valid object declares the expected languages and nothing else. The transcriber then chooses between the 2 codes instead of guessing across every supported language, which is the fix for a meeting that keeps flipping between similar languages.

{
  "notetaker_settings": {
    "transcription": true,
    "transcription_settings": {
      "expected_languages": ["en", "es"]
    }
  }
}

For a deterministic fallback, set fallback_language to a concrete code that’s also in expected_languages. Notetaker uses it whenever the audio doesn’t clearly match one of the expected codes, so a mostly-English meeting with a few Spanish phrases always comes back as English rather than as a mix.

{
  "notetaker_settings": {
    "transcription": true,
    "transcription_settings": {
      "expected_languages": ["en", "es"],
      "fallback_language": "en"
    }
  }
}

When you omit expected_languages, transcription considers all supported languages, and fallback_language isn’t limited to a list. You can set it to any supported code. This is useful when you want automatic detection most of the time but a predictable result when detection is unsure.

{
  "notetaker_settings": {
    "transcription": true,
    "transcription_settings": {
      "fallback_language": "en"
    }
  }
}

Improve recognition of names and jargon

Keyword hints bias the transcriber toward domain-specific terms it would otherwise mis-hear, such as people’s names, company names, product names, and acronyms. Like language hints, they live in transcription_settings, and transcription must be true. Keyword hints are independent of expected_languages, so you can set them on their own.

• keywords: An array of terms to prioritize during transcription. Up to 200 terms. Each term must be 1 to 200 characters and can’t contain control characters. Can’t be null.
• use_speaker_names_as_keywords: A boolean. When true, Notetaker adds known speaker names to the keyword set so they’re transcribed accurately. Can’t be null.

The request below primes the transcriber with three product and vendor names and turns on speaker-name keywords. A term only needs to appear once in the list; Notetaker applies it to the whole meeting.

{
  "notetaker_settings": {
    "transcription": true,
    "transcription_settings": {
      "keywords": ["Nylas", "AssemblyAI", "OAuth"],
      "use_speaker_names_as_keywords": true
    }
  }
}

You can combine keyword hints with language hints in the same object:

{
  "notetaker_settings": {
    "transcription": true,
    "transcription_settings": {
      "expected_languages": ["en", "es"],
      "keywords": ["Nylas", "AssemblyAI"]
    }
  }
}

Replace or clear transcription settings

transcription_settings is one of the composite settings that Nylas replaces as a whole rather than field-merging. To change anything inside it, whether that’s a language code, the fallback, or the keyword list, send the full object you want to end up with. You can’t add a keyword while inheriting expected_languages from a parent calendar; send every field together, or omit the object entirely to inherit it unchanged.

To clear transcription_settings, whether to remove settings already on a Notetaker or to override settings inherited from a calendar on a single event, send it as either null or {}. The two are equivalent: both remove inherited language and keyword hints and return the Notetaker to default transcription behavior.

{
  "notetaker_settings": {
    "transcription_settings": null
  }
}

Supported language codes

These codes are valid in both expected_languages and fallback_language. The list covers about 100 languages, including 3 regional variants of English.

Code	Language	Code	Language	Code	Language	Code	Language
af	Afrikaans	am	Amharic	ar	Arabic	as	Assamese
az	Azerbaijani	ba	Bashkir	be	Belarusian	bg	Bulgarian
bn	Bengali	bo	Tibetan	br	Breton	bs	Bosnian
ca	Catalan	cs	Czech	cy	Welsh	da	Danish
de	German	el	Greek	en	English	en_au	English (Australian)
en_uk	English (British)	en_us	English (American)	es	Spanish	et	Estonian
eu	Basque	fa	Persian	fi	Finnish	fo	Faroese
fr	French	gl	Galician	gu	Gujarati	ha	Hausa
haw	Hawaiian	he	Hebrew	hi	Hindi	hr	Croatian
ht	Haitian Creole	hu	Hungarian	hy	Armenian	id	Indonesian
is	Icelandic	it	Italian	ja	Japanese	jw	Javanese
ka	Georgian	kk	Kazakh	km	Khmer	kn	Kannada
ko	Korean	la	Latin	lb	Luxembourgish	ln	Lingala
lo	Lao	lt	Lithuanian	lv	Latvian	mg	Malagasy
mi	Maori	mk	Macedonian	ml	Malayalam	mn	Mongolian
mr	Marathi	ms	Malay	mt	Maltese	my	Burmese
ne	Nepali	nl	Dutch	nn	Norwegian Nynorsk	no	Norwegian
oc	Occitan	pa	Punjabi	pl	Polish	ps	Pashto
pt	Portuguese	ro	Romanian	ru	Russian	sa	Sanskrit
sd	Sindhi	si	Sinhala	sk	Slovak	sl	Slovenian
sn	Shona	so	Somali	sq	Albanian	sr	Serbian
su	Sundanese	sv	Swedish	sw	Swahili	ta	Tamil
te	Telugu	tg	Tajik	th	Thai	tk	Turkmen
tl	Tagalog	tr	Turkish	tt	Tatar	uk	Ukrainian
ur	Urdu	uz	Uzbek	vi	Vietnamese	yi	Yiddish
yo	Yoruba	zh	Chinese

auto is valid only for fallback_language, not expected_languages. Omitting fallback_language produces the same automatic detection.

Related topics

• Using Nylas Notetaker for the invite flow and the rest of notetaker_settings.
• Notetaker media formats for the transcript file, including the language field that reports the detected code.
• Notetaker configurations for setting transcription defaults once across many Notetakers.