Nearly 20 million people in Spain live in a region with a second official language: Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Basque, or Aranese. When they call customer service, many of them can still only get help in Spanish.
That is about to change.
Under Ley 10/2025, a customer in one of those regions can ask to be served in its co-official language, on every channel, and companies have until December 28, 2026, to make it work inside the same three-minute answer targets as every other call. The law applies whether customer service is in-house or outsourced, so if you run, build, or power customer service lines for essential services or large consumer brands in Spain, you will be responsible for meeting that mark.
Deepgram Nova-3 now has dedicated Basque and Galician models next to Catalan, on our EU endpoint and in self-hosted deployments, so you can understand those callers through a single API.
What you need to know
- Ley 10/2025 covers every utility, telecom, passenger transport, postal, and financial services company in Spain, whatever its size, plus large consumer-facing companies, and they have until December 28, 2026, to adapt.
- The law applies whether customer service is run in-house or by a third party, so providers of contact center services, platforms, and voice agents to these companies will be expected to serve callers in their co-official language and reply in the language they used.
- Nova-3 now transcribes Basque (eu), Galician (gl), Catalan (ca), and Valencian (via the Catalan model) for both recorded and live calls on api.deepgram.com, on the EU endpoint api.eu.deepgram.com, and as self-hosted model files.
- You switch languages with one query parameter, and your existing API keys keep working.
This post covers what the law asks of your automated channels, what Deepgram covers now, and what is still on the way. It is not legal advice, so check your own obligations with your legal team.
Understand what Ley 10/2025 requires
Ley 10/2025 applies regardless of the communication channel. For anyone running voice, that puts every call in scope, whether a person, a phone menu, or a voice agent answers. The full text of Ley 10/2025 has the details, and these are the parts that matter most to a contact center:
- Language. A customer in a region with a co-official language can ask to be served in it, as long as the company operates there, and the reply has to come back in the language they used. The law applies on every channel, so plan for voice agents and phone menus to work in these languages too. Co-official languages are set by each region’s statute of autonomy and include Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Basque, and Aranese. (Aragonese and Asturian are protected regional languages, but not co-official, so they are not covered under Ley 10/2025.)
- Answer times. Phone wait times are capped at three minutes on average. Callers over 65 and people with disabilities get priority, and companies can’t cut off a call because the wait is long.
- A human on request. A customer can always ask to speak to a person, so your voice agent needs a clean handover path, and 95% of requests to be transferred to a person must take place under three minutes. If an unhappy customer asks to speak with a supervisor and the transfer can’t happen within three minutes, the company can call back the same working day.
- Resolution deadlines. Queries, complaints, and incidents must be resolved within 15 working days, unless sector rules set a different deadline. Billing disputes must get a response within five days, and questions about outages of essential services such as energy, water, or telecoms within two hours.
- Records and audits. When a customer consents, calls must be recorded and the company can keep either the recording or its transcript until the customer is informed of the outcome. Every year (or every two years for smaller companies), companies have to hire an auditor accredited by ENAC, Spain’s national accreditation body, to check that the customer service measurements they publish are within 5% of real values.
Meet each requirement with Nova-3
The transcript Nova-3 produces on every call helps you meet these obligations and show that you met them.
Here is how it helps with each requirement:
- Language. Transcribe Catalan (Valencian included), Basque, and Galician calls in real time, so your voice agent understands the caller and any person who takes over sees what was already said.
- Answer times. Route callers using these languages straight to the right queue, which helps calls stay inside the three-minute target and makes sure those who say they’re over 65 or have a disability get to the priority queue.
- A human on request. Catch the request for a person in any of these languages the moment it’s said, and pass the live transcript to the agent so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves.
- Resolution deadlines. Use the transcript to tag every call by topic and flag outages, billing disputes, and complaints as they happen, so each one starts on the right clock.
- Records and audits. Give your QA and compliance teams a transcript of every call that shows how each request was handled and in which language, and use it as evidence for the annual audit.
Keep call audio in the EU or on your own servers
Though Ley 10/2025 doesn’t say where call audio has to be processed, most Spanish enterprises want call audio to stay in the EU. The Deepgram EU endpoint at api.eu.deepgram.com processes requests inside the EU and never falls back to another region, and the Basque and Galician models are available there for both batch and streaming. You keep the same API key and change two things: the host and the language parameter.
This request sends a recorded Basque call to Nova-3 on the EU endpoint. Grab a key from a free Deepgram account first.
For a live call, open a WebSocket to the same host and pass language=gl for Galician or language=eu for Basque. A typical streaming request looks like this:
Call Deepgram from your own server and send the key in the Authorization header, as in the examples above. Never put it in browser code or in a URL, where it ends up in logs and history.
The regional endpoints guide can also show you the SDK setup for Python and JavaScript if you would rather use an SDK client (instead of cURL requests) for the EU host.
Additional questions
Can I run the Basque and Galician models on my own infrastructure (self-hosted)?
- Yes. The Nova-3 Basque and Galician models ship as model files for self-hosted deployments, in batch and streaming versions. Ask your Deepgram account team to add them to your license, and your existing self-hosted setup can serve language=eu and language=gl alongside the Nova-3 models you already run.
How do I route a call to the right language?
- Route on what you already know: the region of the phone number, the language the customer picked in the IVR, or their saved preference in your CRM. Pass that as the language parameter when the call starts. A caller in Bilbao who chose Basque gets language=eu, and a caller in Santiago who chose Galician gets language=gl.
What’s the best way to test Nova-3’s capabilities?
- Pick the region where most of your co-official language calls come from, point a test batch of recordings at Nova-3 on the EU endpoint with the right language code, and compare the transcripts with what your agents heard. Create a free Deepgram account to get an API key.
Help shape our roadmap for Spain’s languages
At the time of writing, Nova-3 covers Catalan (ca), Basque (eu), and Galician (gl), and Valencian is served by the Catalan model. For callers who switch languages mid-call, Nova-3’s multilingual mode (language=multi) listens for 55 languages at once, including Spanish, Catalan, and Galician, and tags each word with its language, so you don’t have to pick the language up front. Multilingual mode runs on our cloud API today, with self-hosted support on the way. Basque isn’t one of its languages yet, so Basque calls run on their own with language=eu.
For voice agents, both Deepgram Flux STT, our conversational speech model, and Deepgram Flux TTS, our text-to-speech model, now support Catalan in early access. For Basque and Galician, anything your system says back will still need recorded prompts, a person, or your current voice provider. Tell your account team which languages and channels matter most to you, because that feedback sets our priorities.
