QContact now supports 30+ languages across 100+ countries — including all 11 official South African languages — covering more than 3 billion speakers worldwide.
Customer experience starts with listening — and listening only works when customers are understood in the language they naturally speak.
Since launching free call transcription to all QContact customers in early 2023, one message came through louder than any other: "When will this work in more languages?"
Today, we're proud to share it does — at scale, and with accuracy built for real-world conversations.
From English-Only to 3 Billion Voices Worldwide
Our initial transcription capability served English speakers — around 1.5 billion people globally. Over the past year, QContact has more than doubled that reach, expanding to over 30 languages across 100+ countries, now covering more than 3 billion speakers.
This now includes all 24 official European Union languages and all 11 official languages of South Africa.
Why South Africa Required a Different Approach
South Africa is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. While English is the language of business, it is not the primary language spoken at home for most South Africans. That diversity introduces real technical challenges:
- Complex grammar structures
- Highly compounded words
- Context-driven meaning
- Frequent code-switching between languages mid-sentence
QContact invested significant time and engineering effort to train and tune speech recognition models specifically for South African languages and accents, building on NVIDIA-powered speech technology.
Now Supporting All 11 Official South African Languages
QContact now delivers production-grade transcription across: English (South African–tuned), isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga, siSwati, Tshivenda, and isiNdebele.
Measuring What Actually Matters: Character Error Rate
Because of these linguistic realities, the industry measures African-language accuracy using Character Error Rate (CER) rather than Word Error Rate (WER). QContact's models are optimised and benchmarked accordingly, ensuring transcription quality reflects human comprehension, not just mathematical scoring.
Built for Real Conversations: Code Switching Support
South African conversations don't stay neatly in one language. QContact's models dynamically support language switching mid-call, without requiring predefined language selection — resulting in more accurate transcripts, better AI summaries, and stronger conversation analytics.
What This Means for CX Teams
- Accurate transcription across 30+ languages
- AI summaries that respect linguistic context
- Conversation analytics that surface real insight
- Full multilingual support at no additional cost
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