Engineering the Future of Contact Center Transcription in Real-time

When we launched ElevateAI in 2023, our mission was clear: get transcription right for the contact center. Not just accurate – but actionable. Not just fast – but domain-tuned, latency-aware, and enterprise-ready.

We began with a model purpose-built for contact center audio and in late 2024, we introduced Echo – a major leap forward in speed, accuracy, and cross-industry applicability. Echo was engineered for real-world conversations, not scripted demos, and quickly became the transcription engine trusted by CX leaders to power intelligent customer experiences.

Now, we’re delivering the next phase of that promise: Echo Real-Time, a streaming transcription model designed for mid-call intelligence and real-time action.

Why Transcription Is the Foundation of Contact Center AI

In the contact center, AI is only as good as the data it’s built on. And when your primary data source is speech, transcription becomes the critical first step. Whether you're enabling real-time agent assist, automating quality monitoring, analyzing sentiment, or powering voicebots and conversational intelligence platforms, it all starts with turning unpredictable, messy audio into structured, readable, and accurate text.

Why Generic Speech-to-Text Falls Short

Generic STT engines weren’t designed for the complexity of contact centers. They struggle in environments where audio comes with:

• Crosstalk and overlapping speakers, often with variable or low-quality inputs
• Industry-specific terminology, like insurance policy numbers, account IDs, or clinical codes
• Code-switching and diverse accents, especially in multilingual, global customer environments
• Enterprise-scale privacy and compliance demands

That’s where ElevateAI comes in.

Built for Contact Center Workloads

Echo by ElevateAI isn’t just another transcription model. It is trained and tuned on real contact center data, not synthetic scripts – built to perform in the chaotic, high-volume conditions that real agents and customers operate in.

From day one, we’ve focused on:

• High accuracy across verticals and use cases
• Speaker separation, clearly identifying agent vs. customer
• Domain-specific vocabulary support, including custom terminology
• Human-readable formatting with punctuation and capitalization
• Scalability, built for enterprise call volumes and performance demands

You can access Echo through our Post-Call API, which provides a fully finalized transcript once the call ends. It’s become a core tool for QA, compliance, coaching, and analytics workflows.

But what if you need insights before the interaction is over?

Introducing Echo Real-Time

With the release of the Echo Real-Time API, we’re unlocking a new class of transcription: live streaming. This isn’t just faster – it is fundamentally more capable. Real-time transcription enables in-the-moment intelligence, including:

• Agent assist, surfacing suggestions while the customer is still speaking
• Real-time alerts, detecting potential churn, escalation risk, or compliance gaps, mid-call
• Live call monitoring for supervisors and automated systems
• Streaming analytics, powering dashboards and AI models, on the fly

Technically speaking, Echo Real-Time delivers:

• Low latency, with word delay under 1.2 seconds in most use cases
• High throughput, supporting concurrent call streams at scale
• Contextual updates, refining transcripts dynamically as audio progresses
• Finalization hooks, so you can preserve the finalized transcript once the call concludes

Echo’s real-time engine is API-first, with no proprietary SDKs or heavy infrastructure. Just fast, clean JSON over WebSockets or REST.

Under the Hood: Real-Time vs. Post-Call

Real-Time and Post-Call transcription serve different needs and both are essential to a modern contact center stack. Think of them as two tools in a unified system, optimized for different stages of the customer journey:

Many enterprise CX teams use both – Real-Time for live actions and Post-Call for deep insights and optimization. Better year, Echo automatically transitions Real-Time sessions to Post-Call processing – allowing you to seamlessly tap into ElevateAI’s broader suite of Gen AI capabilities, analytics, and dashboards without additional integration work.

Real-World AI, Ready for the Enterprise

As we shared in our recent ICMI article, ElevateAI is focused on AI that works in real-world contact centers – not hypothetical research labs. That means:

• Open APIs with full documentation
• Transparent pricing and usage-based scale
• Developer-first onboarding and tooling

Echo, and now Echo Real-Time, are core to that approach. Together, they form a foundation for next-gen transcription – where every interaction becomes both actionable in the moment and valuable over time.

If you’re building AI-driven customer experiences, transcription isn’t a checkbox – it is a critical dependency. With Echo by ElevateAI, you get transcription you can build on. And now, with Echo’s Real-Time model, you can power intelligence while the call is still happening.