Is Cue state of the art?Pending benchmarks.Announced Oct 28, 2026; no independent results yet.
ElevenLabs' forced alignment model: given audio and its transcript, it places every character on the audio timeline. It is the last step of every Scribe transcription and also times subtitles, dubbing and song lyrics. It handles recordings of any length in one pass. Available through the Forced Alignment API; proprietary.
The details so far
- Lab
- ElevenLabs
- Announced
- Oct 28, 2026
- API
- Live · POST https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/forced-alignment (no model parameter); priced at the Speech to Text rate
- Open weights
- Closed · Proprietary; no open weights
- Task
- Forced alignment: character-level timestamps for a known transcript; not a speech-to-text model
- Used in
- Every ElevenLabs Scribe request, plus subtitles, dubbing and lyric timing; rolled out before the Oct 28 post (date not given)
- Limits
- Up to 3 GB and 10 hours of audio, 675,000 characters of text; no diarization
Tags marked unsure are not stated on the lab's own pages.
What would let us call it
Verdicts use only independent boards we already track. Two consecutive snapshots are required before any crown.
- Publicly announced with a source
- Usable by the public (API or weights)
- Listed on an independent board we track
- Enough results for a rank in a category
- Holds across two snapshots (crowns only)
What the lab claims
Self-reported. Shown for context; not used in any verdict.
Lab claim: more accurate than every aligner ElevenLabs tested in all 29 benchmark languages, with 179 ms average error on full recordings vs 283 ms to over 6,000 ms for the others, and 57 ms vs 65 to 920 ms on noisy English.
Lab claim: aligns an hour of audio in about 0.5 s on a production GPU, vs about 2 s for Qwen3-ForcedAligner.
Lab claim: on JamendoLyrics, 92.7% of words start within 0.3 s vs 82.0% for the next aligner, with 0.82 s average start error.
Sources
LABElevenLabs blog: Forced alignment with Cueelevenlabs.io/blog/cue-aligner · Oct 28, 2026LABElevenLabs docs: Forced Alignmentelevenlabs.io/docs/overview/capabilities/forced-alignmentLABElevenLabs on X: Cuex.com/ElevenLabs/status/2115527286065914248 · Oct 28, 2026Tracking continues until an independent board lists it.