Production speech-to-text

Scores as of 2026-10-19 (8 days old).

Depot Pick

Deepgram · 8.50/10 for this job (curated estimate, high confidence)

pricePerf + capability; Deepgram rate card is the benchmark.

Runner-up

AssemblyAI · 8.11/10

Scores higher than the pick on: Developer & agent DX.

When not to use the pick

Need richest audio-intelligence features in one API — AssemblyAI; only Whisper via OpenAI — openai-media.

Lock-in / migration

The pick has lower stored lock-in risk than runner-up AssemblyAI (4 vs 4.2). Self-host fallback listed for this job: OpenAI Whisper, whisper.cpp.

Sourced price (usd_per_minute)

Pick's lowest sourced SKU: Nova-3 Monolingual pre-recorded speech-to-text $0.0043 (usd_per_minute) — source, as of 2026-10-19

Cheapest matching SKU: Deepgram Nova-3 Monolingual pre-recorded speech-to-text $0.0043 — source, as of 2026-10-19. The pick is the cheapest.

Price history: first seen 2026-10-19 · last changed no change recorded · history JSON

Free option

• Groq Free Plan Whisper (free) — source, as of 2026-10-24
• OpenAI Whisper (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25
• whisper.cpp (oss) — source, as of 2026-10-25

Failure modes to watch

• Runaway spend: Set a budget and a tool-call cap per task. Alert when spend jumps. Stop the run at the cap instead of summarizing a partial trace as success.
• Confirmation skip: Gate those tool names on an approval id recorded before the call. A missing approval is a failure even if the downstream tool returns success.
• Identity confusion: Bind every tool call to a user or tenant id. Refuse the call if that id changed mid-task. For a public bot, the operator owns the words the bot shows.
• Non-determinism: Run the task more than once and compare the end state, not a single transcript. Record the trial count next to any success rate you cite.
• Over-refusal: Log refusals separately from successes. Review a sample against the written policy. Do not treat a refusal as a pass, and do not weaken a safety check to raise the pass rate.
• Partial tool success: Require a per-item status and a failure count. Success for the task requires the failed count to be zero or explicitly handed to a retry queue.

Reported outcomes (submitted reports only)

This job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Depot Pick (Deepgram) on this job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Cite: Agent Provider Depot, Depot Pick for production-stt: deepgram, scores as of 2026-10-19. Agents: GET /api/decide?jtbd=production-stt