Arabic Speech-to-Text Providers

Convert Arabic speech to text with real-time streaming support. 8 providers tested with real Gulf Arabic callers in a production voice agent.

Deepgram Nova-3

Best-in-class Arabic STT with ultra-low latency. Production-tested winner.

Avg Latency424ms

StreamingLiveKitProduction Tested

Soniox STT RT v3

High-quality Arabic STT with 44% lower WER than Google Chirp 3.

Avg Latency1678ms

StreamingProduction Tested

Google Cloud STT — Chirp 3

High-quality Arabic STT from Google Cloud, but with significant latency.

Avg Latency2376ms

StreamingLiveKitProduction Tested

ElevenLabs Scribe v2

Not Recommended

ElevenLabs' realtime STT offering — poor quality and slow for Arabic.

Avg Latency2000ms–2500ms

StreamingLiveKitProduction Tested

Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo

Not Recommended

Fast Whisper inference on Groq hardware — poor Arabic quality with inconsistent latency.

Avg Latency284ms–3388ms

Production Tested

Groq Whisper Large v3

Not Recommended

Full Whisper v3 on Groq — same poor Arabic quality as the turbo variant.

Avg Latency32ms–3494ms

Production Tested

Not Recommended

Ultra-fast Arabic STT with poor transcription quality.

Avg Latency460ms

StreamingProduction Tested

Mistral Voxtral Mini

Mistral's speech model — completely non-functional for Arabic.

Production Tested