If your qualification depends on hearing a specific English word, check how it is written in the transcript. In one deployment, a CBSE exam-prep book publisher's agent looked for designations like PRT, TGT and PGT that genuine teachers mention unprompted. On a Hindi-English benchmark, the speech-to-text transcribed some of those acronyms in Devanagari. A check for the English string would have marked real teachers as unqualified. This post explains the problem and how to design around it.
Build a Hinglish agent that qualifies correctly: Start free on Edesy — Rs 50 free credit, no demo needed.
What happens
A teacher says: "Main TGT hoon, Class 9 aur 10 ko science padhata hoon."
Depending on the language setting, the transcript may read:
- "Main TGT hoon..." (Latin script), or
- "मैं टीजीटी हूं..." (Devanagari), or a mix.
Both are correct transcriptions of what was said. The problem is anything downstream that expects one spelling.
Where it breaks
- Keyword rules in post-call extraction. "Qualified if the transcript contains TGT, PGT or B.Ed" silently fails.
- The agent's own logic. An instruction like "if the caller says TGT, skip the class question" may not fire.
- Reports and searches. Searching transcripts for "CTET" misses "सीटीईटी".
The same applies to other common English terms on Indian calls: EMI, KYC, OTP, GST, COD, PIN code, brand and product names.
How to design around it
- Judge meaning, not strings. Ask the extraction step "Did the person mention a teaching designation or qualification (in any script)? Which one?" instead of matching exact text. LLMs handle Devanagari and Latin spellings of the same acronym well when told to.
- List both spellings in instructions for the few terms that matter: "TGT (टीजीटी), PGT (पीजीटी), B.Ed (बीएड)".
- Don't make one keyword decisive. Use it as one signal alongside class, subject and how detailed the answer is.
- Keep the language setting that fits your callers. Switching to English-only transcription to fix acronyms usually makes the Hindi parts worse.
- Test with real audio. Record 20-30 real or realistic calls and read the raw transcripts before trusting any rule.
A quick audit checklist
- List every word or acronym your qualification or routing depends on.
- Search a day of transcripts for each, in both scripts.
- Rewrite exact-match rules as meaning-based questions.
- Re-check after any change to speech or language settings.
Related: how the agent says acronyms
This post is about hearing and writing acronyms. For how the agent pronounces numbers, acronyms and class names, see pronunciation of numbers and acronyms in India. For choosing between Hinglish and pure Hindi, see Hinglish vs pure Hindi on AI calls.
Try it
Edesy supports 75+ languages, including 14 Indian languages, including Hindi-English mixed calls, with post-call extraction you can write in plain language. Create a free account, or see how a publisher verifies teachers with AI calls.