Speech-to-Text Serving in Production: Comparing Faster-Whisper, Moonshine, SenseVoice, and NeMo Canary Architecture, Streaming Latency, and GPU Economics
In conversational voice AI and real-time agentic workflows, the speech-to-text (STT) layer sets the hard lower bound on system responsiveness. Human conversational cadence expects turn-taking latencies between 200ms and 500ms. When an AI pipeline must accommodate downstream large language model (LLM) time-to-first-token generation (100ms to 250ms) and text-to-speech (TTS) audio synthesis (100ms to 200ms), the automatic speech recognition (ASR) stage cannot exceed 100ms to 150ms of processing ove
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