What is Speech-to-text model?
The AI that turns spoken audio into written text. It can run on a company's servers or on your own computer.
A speech-to-text model (also called automatic speech recognition, or ASR) is the AI that listens to audio and writes down the words. It’s what powers meeting transcripts, voice typing and captions.
Local or cloud
- Cloud models run on a provider’s servers. Your audio is sent to them over the internet.
- Local models run on your own computer. The audio never leaves it, and they work offline.
Open models like OpenAI’s Whisper and NVIDIA’s Parakeet made good local transcription practical on ordinary laptops. More in Local vs cloud transcription.
How accuracy is measured
Usually by word error rate: wrong words per 100 on a public test. Real meetings, with accents, crosstalk and bad microphones, are harder than tests, so trying a model on your own recordings tells you more.
In Fetch
Fetch runs speech-to-text on your PC with two models: a fast live one during the call, and a careful clean-up pass after. You can pick from Parakeet, Whisper, IBM Granite Speech and others, and compare them on the same meeting. See Choose a speech model.
Questions people ask
What is word error rate?
The usual accuracy measure for speech-to-text. It counts wrong, missing and extra words per 100 words on a test recording. Lower is better.
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