Hi, this is Sonetho. ⚡
"For Korean speech recognition, isn't Naver still the one to beat?"
You hear it all the time, but almost nobody has actually measured it.
So we did.
We fed the same 8 Korean audio clips into three engines and compared the output character by character against reference scripts.
📊 Results at a Glance (Character Error Rate, lower is more accurate)
| Category | CLOVA CSR | Scribe v1 | Scribe v2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emotional dialogue | 3.2% | 1.1% | 1.1% |
| News-style reading | 0~0.8% | 0~0.8% | 0~0.8% |
| Mixed English and numbers | 36.9~37.7% | 8.5~13.8% | 8.5~20.8% |
| Long-form consistency | 1.7~7.3% | 0% | 0% |
| Average | 11.4% | 3.2% | 4.0% |
First, credit where credit is due.
On pure Korean, CSR is virtually flawless too.
All three engines tied in the 0% range on news-style reading.
If that's all your audio looks like, any of them will do.
💥 The Real Battle Was Mixed-In English
The moment brand names and numbers slipped into Korean sentences, the gap blew wide open.
Here are a few of CSR's actual outputs, copied verbatim.
| Ground truth | CLOVA CSR output |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | "채취 pt" (a meaningless Korean string) |
| Gemini | "나재민이", "개 미니" (both unrelated Korean words) |
| 일레븐랩스 (ElevenLabs) | "11 x" |
| 약 15달러 수준 (about $15) | "약 시부터 여수 중" (gibberish) |
If your audio mixes in English words, think YouTube subtitles, tech content, or a typical modern meeting recording, that gap translates directly into cleanup work.
Scribe preserved ChatGPT, Gemini, and API exactly as written across the same passages.
🧐 Scribe Wasn't Perfect Either
In the interest of honesty, here are Scribe's mistakes too.
It struggles with proper nouns it has never seen.
It wrote "sonetho.com" as "sonto.com", and in one sample it misheard "11달러" ($11) as "1달러" ($1).
If your document has money riding on its numbers, proofreading is non-negotiable with any engine.
The difference between v1 and v2 was interesting as well.
v2 automatically normalizes "22달러" ($22 spelled out in Korean) into "$22".
Our scoring method (CER) counts that as an error, but the meaning is spot on.
If verbatim fidelity matters, go with v1; if you want readable subtitles and documents, v2 is the right pick.
v2 also comes in a real-time streaming version.
💰 How the Pricing Compares
ElevenLabs Scribe: $0.22 per hour (batch).
Even the free plan includes 4.5 hours per month.
The $6 Starter includes 27 hours and the $22 Creator includes 100, so most personal workloads fit comfortably inside a plan.
CLOVA Speech Recognition (CSR): pay-as-you-go, billed in 15-second increments rounded up.
Check the exact rate in the Naver Cloud pricing calculator.
Note that CSR is an API for short utterances with a 60-second limit.
For long recordings and speaker diarization, you need a separate product called CLOVA Speech.
🤔 So Which One Should You Use
When CLOVA CSR is the right call
Short utterances that are mostly pure Korean.
Projects with Korean domestic cloud infrastructure requirements.
Teams already invested in the Naver Cloud ecosystem.
When ElevenLabs Scribe is the right call
Subtitles and meeting notes for content that mixes English and Korean.
IT and marketing audio full of brand names.
You can test the quality yourself on the free 4.5 hours before committing.
Try ElevenLabs Scribe for Free →
🧪 Methodology (Reproducible)
We wrote scripts across 4 categories (emotional dialogue, news style, mixed English and numbers, long form) and synthesized them with two high-quality TTS voices (CLOVA Ara Pro and ElevenLabs Hyuk) to create 8 audio clips.
Each clip went through all three engines and was compared character by character (CER) against the reference script.
Full disclosure on the limitations.
The input is TTS-synthesized audio, so conditions are noise-free and ideal; real human speech or noisy environments may shift the numbers.
Some errors may also stem from the TTS pronunciation itself.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. Which STT is the most accurate for Korean?
In this test, Scribe v1 posted the lowest average character error rate at 3.2%.
That said, on formal pure Korean, CLOVA CSR also tied in the 0% range, so whether your audio contains English is the real deciding factor.
Q. What's the difference between CLOVA Speech Recognition (CSR) and CLOVA Speech?
CSR is an API for short utterances under 60 seconds, while CLOVA Speech is a separate product that supports long recordings and speaker diarization.
This test covers CSR.
Q. Should I use Scribe v1 or v2?
Pick v1 if preserving the original notation matters, and v2 if you want clean, readable output where things like currency symbols get normalized automatically.
v2 also supports real-time streaming ($0.39 per hour).
For hands-on interview transcription and speaker diarization, the story continues in ElevenLabs vs Whisper vs Deepgram: STT compared.
See you in the next post. This was Sonetho. ⚡