Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Most people think speech to text is just “audio in, words out.”
That’s fine… until you build a real voice agent.
Then one misheard city name breaks your CRM.
One wrong digit fires the wrong automation.
And suddenly your “great WER” means nothing.
What actually matters is entity accuracy, latency measured in milliseconds, and handling messy human speech. Accents. Code switching. Half finished sentences. Real conversations don’t wait for perfect transcripts.
This is why partial transcripts, fast turn taking, and strong NER matter more than leaderboard metrics. And why Montreal is the ultimate stress test for STT systems.
This is also why I like how Gladia approaches the problem. No hype. Just engineering for how people actually speak.
If you’re building voice agents, ask a better question than “what’s the best STT?”
Ask whether it understands humans in the real world. 🎙️
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#AIEngineering #VoiceAI #SpeechToText #short
Most people think speech to text is just “audio in, words out.”
That’s fine… until you build a real voice agent.
Then one misheard city name breaks your CRM.
One wrong digit fires the wrong automation.
And suddenly your “great WER” means nothing.
What actually matters is entity accuracy, latency measured in milliseconds, and handling messy human speech. Accents. Code switching. Half finished sentences. Real conversations don’t wait for perfect transcripts.
This is why partial transcripts, fast turn taking, and strong NER matter more than leaderboard metrics. And why Montreal is the ultimate stress test for STT systems.
This is also why I like how Gladia approaches the problem. No hype. Just engineering for how people actually speak.
If you’re building voice agents, ask a better question than “what’s the best STT?”
Ask whether it understands humans in the real world. 🎙️
I’m Louis-François, PhD dropout, now CTO & co-founder at Towards AI. Follow me for tomorrow’s no-BS AI roundup 🚀
#AIEngineering #VoiceAI #SpeechToText #short
