Head-to-head comparison based on real production benchmarks with Gulf Arabic callers.
Ultra-fast Arabic STT with poor transcription quality.
Full Whisper v3 on Groq — same poor Arabic quality as the turbo variant.
Users had to repeat themselves frequently. Quality unacceptable for production use.
Described as 'still shit' in production testing. Non-turbo version did not improve quality.
| Feature | Speechmatics | Groq Whisper Large v3 |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time streaming transcription | ✓ | ✗ |
| Configurable endpointing | ✓ | ✗ |
| Standard and enhanced operating points | ✓ | ✗ |
| Custom dictionary | ✓ | ✗ |
| Hardware-accelerated inference | ✗ | ✓ |
| Full Whisper Large v3 model | ✗ | ✓ |
| Batch and real-time modes | ✗ | ✓ |
| Capability | Speechmatics | Groq Whisper Large v3 |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming support | ✓ | ✗ |
| LiveKit plugin | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | ✗ |
| API style | WebSocket streaming + REST | REST (OpenAI-compatible) |
| SDKs | Python, Node.js | Python, Node.js |
Amazingly fast but Arabic quality is too poor for production. The speed advantage is meaningless when users have to repeat themselves.
Same poor Arabic quality as the turbo variant. Whisper models on Groq are not viable for Arabic speech recognition.
Groq Whisper Large v3 is faster with an average end-of-utterance delay of 32ms–3494ms, which is 428ms faster than Speechmatics.
Speechmatics has a quality rating of 1/5 (Poor). Users had to repeat themselves frequently. Quality unacceptable for production use.
Both providers are viable options. Speechmatics: Amazingly fast but Arabic quality is too poor for production. The speed advantage is meaningless when users have to repeat themselves. Groq Whisper Large v3: Same poor Arabic quality as the turbo variant. Whisper models on Groq are not viable for Arabic speech recognition.
Speechmatics starts at $0.0042 per minute (Real-time streaming). Groq Whisper Large v3 starts at $0 per minute (Rate-limited free tier).