# ElevenLabs' Cue aligns transcript characters to audio in a single pass

> Original title: How your transcript knows where each word is spoken

- Source: ElevenLabs Blog
- Published: 2026-10-28T12:00:00.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/c877qp6lrorwrotw2udsm1l1c
- Original: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/cue-aligner

## Summary

ElevenLabs introduces Cue, a forced alignment model that places every character in an audio file on a timeline and powers its Scribe speech-to-text models. ElevenLabs says Cue beat every aligner it tested on real-world recordings in all 29 benchmark languages. The company reports average timing errors of 179 milliseconds on full recordings and aligns an hour of audio in about half a second on its production GPU.