Head-to-head comparison based on real production benchmarks with Gulf Arabic callers.
Best-in-class Arabic STT with ultra-low latency. Production-tested winner.
Full Whisper v3 on Groq — same poor Arabic quality as the turbo variant.
Accurately captures Gulf Arabic phrases. No user repetitions needed in production calls.
Described as 'still shit' in production testing. Non-turbo version did not improve quality.
| Feature | Deepgram Nova-3 | Groq Whisper Large v3 |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time streaming transcription | ✓ | ✗ |
| Automatic language detection | ✓ | ✗ |
| Endpointing / end-of-utterance detection | ✓ | ✗ |
| Punctuation and formatting | ✓ | ✗ |
| Word-level timestamps | ✓ | ✗ |
| Custom vocabulary | ✓ | ✗ |
| Multichannel support | ✓ | ✗ |
| Hardware-accelerated inference | ✗ | ✓ |
| Full Whisper Large v3 model | ✗ | ✓ |
| Batch and real-time modes | ✗ | ✓ |
| Capability | Deepgram Nova-3 | Groq Whisper Large v3 |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming support | ✓ | ✗ |
| LiveKit plugin | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| API style | WebSocket streaming + REST | REST (OpenAI-compatible) |
| SDKs | Python, Node.js, Go, .NET, Rust | Python, Node.js |
The clear winner for Arabic STT. Deepgram Nova-3 delivers excellent quality at 424ms average EOU delay — fast enough for real-time voice agents.
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 392ms faster than Deepgram Nova-3.
Deepgram Nova-3 has a quality rating of 5/5 (Excellent). Accurately captures Gulf Arabic phrases. No user repetitions needed in production calls.
Deepgram Nova-3 is recommended for production use. The clear winner for Arabic STT. Deepgram Nova-3 delivers excellent quality at 424ms average EOU delay — fast enough for real-time voice agents.
Deepgram Nova-3 starts at $0.0043 per minute (Nova-3 streaming). Groq Whisper Large v3 starts at $0 per minute (Rate-limited free tier).