Definition
VideoText editorial team. Updated September 13, 2026.
Speaker diarization answers “who spoke when?” It segments audio into speaker turns and assigns labels such as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2. It does not, by itself, name those people.
The sections below explain how speaker diarization is used in transcription and subtitle work, what people often mix up, and which VideoText workflow applies when the next step is a file or review pass.
The system finds change points in the audio, clusters segments that sound like the same voice, and writes a label per turn. A later human pass can rename Speaker 2 to “Maya.”
Interviews, meetings, and podcasts are hard to read as an unlabeled wall of text. Diarization is also a prerequisite for some caption styles that put a speaker name on each cue.
Identification matches a voice to a known person or enrollment profile. Diarization only separates voices in this recording. Teams often run diarization first, then rename labels.
