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Batch Appliance Release Notes

6.0.0 [2024-07-09]​

New
  • GPU & CPU
    • New Virtual Appliance architecture with support for our latest generation of Ursa GPU models
    • New transcription language - Hebrew (he)
    • New transcription language - Persian (fa)
    • Automatic Usage Reporting is enabled by default
  • GPU
    • GPU Ursa models - all 50 languages are now available on GPU
      • Major transcription accuracy gains
      • Major improvement in Speaker Diarization accuracy
      • Faster transcription
    • Bilingual Spanish and English language pack - this enables Spanish and English to be transcribed accurately within the same file
    • Audio Events: Detection of music, laughter and applause in media files now supported. Refer to documentation here to get started
Improvements
  • Improved transcription accuracy for English, Norwegian, Romanian, Basque, Belarusian, Estonian, Mongolian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Welsh
  • Enhanced transcription of disfluencies in English. The model now more accurately captures common disfluencies like "um" and "uh". This change makes our ASR even more accurate for verbatim transcription, great for use cases such as audio editing, analytics on hesitations for call centers and legal transcription. For details on how to identify disfluencies in output, see the documentation here
  • More accurate transcription of short utterances of the word "I" in English
  • More accurate transcription of acronyms in English
  • Improvements to capitalization for English transcription
  • Improved accuracy when transcribing audio with periods of silence
  • Channel Diarization now supports up to 100 separate input channels
Fixes
  • Fixes for specific transcription accuracy issues in English, German, Swedish and Norwegian
  • Fix for issue affecting recognition of English words ending in 'erm'
  • Fixed an error with custom dictionary when the content is only a "-"
  • Fix for transcribed words returned during non-speech audio when Custom Dictionary is used
  • Security fixes

4.3.0​

Improvements
  • Language vocabulary improvements for French (fr), Italian (it), Hindi (hi), and Korean (ko)
  • Remodelled German (de) language pack to utilize subwords, separating words into smaller segments to reduce Word Error Rate (WER)
  • Improved numeral formatting in English
    • Improved formatting for common telephone numbers, measurements, websites, email addresses and credit cards
    • Alphanumerics now have upper-case letters
    • Added regional handling for en-AU and en-US Output Locale to keep 'pounds' as words
    • A number of other improvements and fixes for better readability
Fixes
  • Fix for missing accented characters in Dutch transcription
  • Security fixes

4.2.0​

New
  • 14 new languages: Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Esperanto, Estonian, Galician, Interlingua, Marathi, Mongolian, Tamil, Thai, Uyghur, Vietnamese, and Welsh
  • The JSON-v2 output version is now 2.8, specific changes are:
    • Additional language pack information has been added to the metadata section of the transcription results. There is now more detailed information about properties of the language being used, such as writing direction and word delimiter.
    • We now also record the correct attachment direction for punctuation (e.g. before or after a space) in a new attaches_to field.
Improvements
  • Improved accuracy for 20 languages: Latvian (lv), Swedish (sv), Hungarian (hu), Portuguese (pt), Polish (pl), Mandarin Chinese (cmn), Arabic (ar), Dutch (nl), Slovak (sk), Bulgarian (bg), Romanian (ro), Slovenian (sl), Lithuanian (It), Croatian (hr), Malay (ms), Catalan (ca), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Greek (el), Turkish (tr)
  • Improved formatting of numeric entities such as dates, currencies and large numbers for Swedish (sv), Norwegian (no), and Dutch (nl).
Fixes
  • Fix for accurately handling "p" as "pence" when transcribing currency in English (en).
  • Fix for handling small denominator fractions in Italian (it) and not converting to similar English homonyms e.g. "un terzo" being converted to "1/3".

Known Limitations​

The following are known issues in this release:

Issue IDSummaryDetailed Description and Possible Workarounds
REQ-1409Proteus HCL with <unk> causes out of memory errorA Custom Dictionary list that contains the word <unk> causes the worker to crash.
REQ-7549Memory leak affecting gRPCThere is a small memory leak in the gRPC Python server https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/5913.
REQ-10160Advanced punctuation for Spanish (es) does not contain inverted marks.Inverted marks [ ¿ ¡ ] are not currently available for Spanish advanced punctuation.
REQ-10627Double full stops when acronym is at the end of the sentenceIf there is an acronym at the end of the sentence, then a double full stop will be output, for example: "team G.B.."
REQ-10634Putting "-" as an item in additional vocab configuration will cause the container to failDo not enter just a "-" on its own in Custom Dictionary either as an additional vocab item or in the sounds_like property. Hyphens are still supported when entered as part of phrases or words
REQ-14402When running very large numbers of small jobs (less than 10 seconds) offline, this may cause some of the jobs to be rejectedIf you encounter this issue, please ensure licensing is in offline mode when running the appliance offline

Supported Platforms​

Virtual Appliance image (OVA) for installation on:

  • VMware ESXi 6.5+ or VMware Workstation Player.
  • VirtualBox 5.2+
  • Amazon EC2

See the Installation and Admin Guide for details on the minimum specifications for the VM. The maximum number of concurrent jobs (maxworkers) that you can run on a single appliance is 30.

Form Factors​

VariantImage SizeMax. Disk SpaceLanguages
nano10GB40GBen
mini15GB40GBen, de, es
midi30GB60GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt
maxi52GB80GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt, it, da, pl, ca, hi, ru, sv
plus61GB80GBen, cmn, no, ar, bg, cs, el, fi, hu, hr, lt, lv, ro, sk, sl, tr, ms, id, yue, ba, eu, be, eu, et, gl, ia, mr, mn, ta, th, ug, vi, cy

Upgrade Path​

Remove the license from your old appliance (see the Admin Guide), then re-import the new OVA and configure networking as per the Installation and Admin guide. You will need to re-apply the license code you have once the OVA has imported.

Installation​

Upload the OVA to VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation Player, or VirtualBox. See the Installation and Admin Guide for more information.

Performance at Scale​

Further notes on IOPS requirements under heavy usage of the appliance are now provided in the System Requirements section of the Installation Guide.