Real-Time Multichannel Speech-to-Text: Transcribe Stereo Audio in One Stream

Stereo recordings are everywhere, from contact center calls to doctor-patient conversations. The challenge is turning both sides into one useful transcript. Until now, there were two common approaches: 🔹 Split the channels, run two recognition sessions, and merge the results in post-processing. 🔹 Mix the audio down to mono and use speaker diarization to separate speakers. Real-time multichannel speech-to-text adds a new, optimized option: keep the stereo input in one continuous session. Every result is tagged with its source channel, so there's no post-processing needed to merge transcripts. In this demo, we run a contact center conversation through all three modes side by side and compare the results: ✅ Stronger handling of overlapping speech than mono + diarization ✅ Simpler orchestration, with one session and no merge step ✅ Lower processing cost: split-channel processing costs about twice as much ✅ Can be combined with speaker diarization when a channel has more than one speaker Learn more: https://msft.it/6053aoObb #AzureSpeech #MicrosoftFoundry #SpeechToText