# ElevenLabs — How your transcript knows where each word is spoken

- Company: ElevenLabs (elevenlabs.io)
- Announced: 2026-10-28T12:00:00+00:00
- Category: new-model
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: yes
- Group: models
- Source: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/cue-aligner
- Record: https://forck.live/items/28942-how-your-transcript-knows-where-each-word-is-spoken
- Subject: Voice AI
- Models affected: Cue, Scribe

ElevenLabs is introducing Cue, a forced alignment model that places every character in an audio file on a precise timeline and powers the Scribe model family. The company says Cue is more accurate than every aligner it tested on real-world recordings, across all 29 languages of the benchmark. Cue is the last step in the speech-to-text pipeline: Scribe transcribes the audio and the aligner sets the timing, and every Scribe request passes through it. The same model also powers subtitles, dubbing and lyric timing for music, and is available on its own through the Forced Alignment API. On full recordings, Cue's average timing error is 179 milliseconds, while the open-source tools tested ranged from 283 ms to more than 6,000 ms. On English recordings with background noise, overlapping speech or ambient music, Cue's average error is 57 ms, against 65 ms to 920 ms for the others. Cue handles recordings of any length in a single pass, covers more than 90 benchmark languages, and aligns an hour of audio in about half a second on ElevenLabs' production GPU.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://elevenlabs.io/blog/cue-aligner:

> If you’ve ever watched a movie on TV where there’s an issue with the broadcast, and the actors’ dialogue is completely out of sync with the captions, you know how distracting it can get, and pull you out of the story. Videos and software using voice models have the same problem: A subtitle that appears a second late, or a transcript that highlights the wrong word, can feel just as broken.
> 
> “Humans are quite good at aligning media, at the world level at least,” said Danila Kozlov, a researcher at ElevenLabs working on alignment. “We often have the inherent feel of where a word is beginning, but at the character level and with sub-millisecond precision, it’s a lot harder.”
> 
> Today, ElevenLabs is introducing Cue, a forced alignment model that places every character in an audio file on a precise timeline. Cue powers ElevenLabs’ Scribe model family, and on real-world recordings, it’s more accurate than every aligner ElevenLabs tested, in all 29 languages of the benchmark. It also handles recordings of any length in a single pass and aligns an hour of audio in less than a second.
> 
> What is forced alignment?

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