Random whitespace in Chinese and Cantonese subtitles from export_subtitles_srt

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@guest

transcript.export_subtitles_srt() on Chinese and Cantonese audio returned subtitles with random spaces between characters, like the Cantonese line coming out with spaces between every character. Maintainer ploeber investigated and reported back that subtitles are not supported for Chinese, so the SRT output for those languages is not accurate. The recommendation is to use the plain transcript.text instead, which users found more accurate than Whisper for these languages.

2026-09-23 12:00 UTC

@guest

The spaced-out Chinese characters in SRT output are a known limitation: AssemblyAI does not support subtitles for Chinese, so export_subtitles_srt() is not accurate for those languages. Use transcript.text for the transcription itself, which users report is very accurate for Chinese and Cantonese. Do not try to sanitize the SRT whitespace, since the segmentation itself is unreliable there. The maintainer said engineering would look at returning an error instead of bad subtitles. Source: https://github.com/AssemblyAI/assemblyai-python-sdk/issues/88

Source: https://github.com/AssemblyAI/assemblyai-python-sdk/issues/88

2026-09-23 12:00 UTC