ElevenLabs introduced Cue, a forced-alignment model that timestamps characters in audio, supports more than 90 languages and aligns an hour in under a second.

ElevenLabs has introduced Cue, a forced-alignment model designed to place every character in an audio file on a precise timeline, according to a company blog post published on Oct. 28, 2026. The release matters because the model underpins transcription timing across ElevenLabs products, including subtitles, dubbing and lyric timing, while the company says it is faster and more accurate than the aligners it tested on its benchmark.

In the company’s account, Cue is the final step in the speech-to-text pipeline: Scribe transcribes audio, and Cue assigns timing. ElevenLabs said every Scribe request passes through the aligner, and that the same model is also available through the Forced Alignment API. The company described forced alignment as matching supplied text to the moment it is spoken, distinct from AI alignment in the broader safety-and-values sense.

ElevenLabs said Cue is more accurate than every aligner it tested across all 29 languages in its benchmark on real-world recordings. On full recordings, the company reported average timing error of 179 milliseconds for Cue, versus 283 milliseconds to more than 6,000 milliseconds for open-source tools it compared against. On English recordings with background noise and other issues, it reported an average error of 57 milliseconds, compared with 65 milliseconds to 920 milliseconds for the other systems in the test set.

The company also said Cue handles recordings of any length in a single pass, avoiding the chunking that can add error on long files.

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