Adding Languages

Add languages to a Virtual Appliance deployment

As of 08 October 2025 we have moved our public containers from artifactory to Azure Container Registry (ACR), please reach out to Support to update your credentials.

Adding languages is currently only supported for batch mode, if you need extra realtime languages please reach out to Support.

If you have access to the Speechmatics Container Repository, you can install additional CPU-only languages on the Appliance.

Log into the appliance using SSH with the username smadmin, as described in Remote Access. At the commandline, run the configure_languages.sh script. You will be prompted for credentials for the Speechmatics Container Repository.

You will need to know which version of the images are compatible with your appliance, this will be documented here, but until then reach out to Support. Language codes are the standard two-letter ISO codes used in configuring transcription, for example: "de", "fr".

Appliance versions up to and including 6.2.1 will pull from our artifactory repository by default, as of 08 October 2025 we will deprecate public access to this repository (see above). If running an appliance version 6.2.1 or earlier, you will need to configure your appliance to pull from the ACR repository instead.

export SM_DOCKER_PUBLIC=speechmaticspublic.azurecr.io

Access to the Speechmatics repository is needed to download new languages, these credentials can be set in the environment but need to be base64 encoded, alternately if unset the user will be prompted for the username and password after running the configure languages script. If you need access to the Speechmatics container repository please reach out to Support.

export CRICTL_AUTH="$(echo -n <username>:<password> | base64)"

Add a language:

sudo CRICTL_AUTH="$(echo -n <username>:<password> | base64)" SM_DOCKER_PUBLIC=speechmaticspublic.azurecr.io BUILD_MODE=batch configure_languages.sh <version> <language-code> [<language-code> ...]

Remove a language:

sudo CRICTL_AUTH="$(echo -n <username>:<password> | base64)" SM_DOCKER_PUBLIC=speechmaticspublic.azurecr.io BUILD_MODE=batch configure_languages.sh -r <language-code> [<language-code> ...]

Running the configure language script requires superuser access.

After the script has completed, the new language will be available to use.

Adding a transcription language with this script will also make it available for auto Language Identification.

Reverting

If something appears to have gone wrong after running the script, the system configuration can be restored by running

sudo kubectl apply -f /root/.siab_deployment/k8s/bjapi.yaml

To assist Speechmatics Support, running this command will show the currently configured languages:

kubectl get -o json deployment/api | \
jq -r '.spec.template.spec.containers[0].env[]|select(.name="SM_FEATURES_VALIDATION").value'

This command will print a configuration file, under batch->transcription->languages there should be a section like:

{
  ...
  "batch": {
    "transcription": [
      {
        "version": "latest",
        "languages": [
          "en"
        ],
        ...
      }
    ]
  }
  ...
}