Names are the hardest words in any language
A speech model predicts the next word from context, and context is exactly what a proper noun lacks. “I spoke to…” could be followed by any name on earth, so the model falls back on what it heard acoustically — and acoustically, Rahul and Raoul are nearly identical.
This gets worse in a room like ours. A transcript that has to hold Arabic, South Asian, Filipino and European names is being asked to distinguish sounds that several of those languages do not treat as different sounds at all.
Say the name early, and say it with a role
“Ahmed, you were going to speak to the contractor” gives the model two things: an acoustic sample of the name and a context that makes it a person. A name said once in isolation, in the first ten seconds, before anyone has settled, gives it neither.
The practical version of this is the round of introductions everyone skips on a call with people who already know each other. Doing it anyway is thirty seconds that make the whole transcript readable.
Spell the ones that matter
If a name is going into a contract or a medical record, spell it out loud once. It feels stilted and it is the difference between a record you can rely on and one you have to check.
The same applies to company names, project codenames and anything invented. A model has never heard your internal project name and will render it as the nearest real word every time.
Fix it once, not every time
Most transcription tools, ours included, let you add terms the model should prefer — the names of your team, your clients, your products. Ten minutes of setup removes the most common error permanently.
This is the single highest-return thing you can do with any transcription tool, and almost nobody does it.
Know what a wrong name costs
In a personal note, nothing. In a clinical record or an attendance note, a great deal — which is why a transcript is a draft you review, not a document you file. Any tool that encourages you to skip the review is selling you a risk, ours included if we ever did.