Best Arabic Speech-to-Text API in 2026

We tested 8 STT providers with Gulf Arabic in a production voice agent. Here's which one actually works.

Best Arabic Speech-to-Text API in 2026

Finding a good Arabic STT API is harder than it should be. Most providers claim "100+ language support" but fall apart when you feed them Gulf Arabic from a real phone call. We know because we tested 8 of them in a production real estate voice agent.

What We Tested

We built a voice agent that handles incoming calls for a real estate company in the Gulf. Real callers, real Arabic dialects, real background noise. Not synthetic benchmarks — actual production traffic.

For each STT provider, we measured:

  • EOU Delay: How quickly the provider detects the user finished speaking
  • Full Turn Time: End-to-end from user silence to agent audio playback
  • Transcription Quality: Did the provider correctly capture Gulf Arabic? Did users have to repeat themselves?

The Results

Winner: Deepgram Nova-3

424ms average EOU delay with excellent Arabic quality. That's 75% faster than the next best option (Soniox at 1678ms) and 4x faster than Google Chirp 3 (2376ms).

Deepgram Nova-3 correctly captured phrases like "حبيت استفسر عندكم عرض للبيع" and "تصنيف الارض" without any user repetitions needed. The combination of speed and accuracy is unmatched.

Runner-Up: Soniox STT RT v3

1678ms average EOU delay with 16.2% WER — actually the lowest word error rate we measured. If you need maximum accuracy and can tolerate higher latency, Soniox is worth considering.

The Rest

| Provider | Avg EOU Delay | Quality | Verdict | |----------|--------------|---------|---------| | Deepgram Nova-3 | 424ms | Excellent | Winner | | Speechmatics | 460ms | Poor | Fast but inaccurate | | Soniox RT v3 | 1678ms | Excellent | Best WER | | Google Chirp 3 | 2376ms | Excellent | Too slow | | ElevenLabs Scribe | 2000-2500ms | Poor | Not viable | | Groq Whisper Turbo | 284-3388ms | Poor | Inconsistent | | Groq Whisper v3 | 32-3494ms | Poor | Inconsistent | | Mistral Voxtral | N/A | Non-functional | Zero output |

Key Takeaways

  1. Whisper models don't work for Arabic. Both Groq Whisper variants produced terrible transcriptions. Don't waste your time.

  2. Speed without quality is useless. Speechmatics was blazing fast (460ms) but users had to repeat themselves constantly. A fast bad answer is still a bad answer.

  3. Mistral Voxtral doesn't support Arabic at all. Despite claiming multilingual support, it produced zero transcriptions.

  4. Deepgram Nova-3 breaks the speed/quality tradeoff. It's both the fastest AND one of the most accurate options.

Our Recommendation

If you're building an Arabic voice application in 2026, start with Deepgram Nova-3. It has a generous free tier ($200 credit), excellent documentation, LiveKit plugin support, and the best production performance we've measured.

For batch transcription where latency doesn't matter, Google Chirp 3 remains an excellent choice with the broadest dialect support.