Fermion Research's Phonon-2, a 164 MB open English speech model released 29 September, transcribed an hour of audio in 39.3 seconds on our 6-thread Linux server, about 15x faster than Whisper large-v3-turbo, at level accuracy. Its hotwords fix for names only works on Macs.
SpaceXAI shipped Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 with two claims stacked on top of each other: twice as accurate as version 1.0, and first among 32 streaming models. Both are defensible. Neither is the reason the release matters.
On September 8, 2026, European lab Desert Ant Labs published 18 small AI models that run entirely on a users device, with SDKs for Swift, Kotlin and JavaScript and a free tier covering the first 100,000 monthly active devices per platform.
Microsoft AI released MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model at $0.10 per audio hour across 60 languages, with speaker diarization and word-level timestamps built in.
Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, GPT-4o Transcribe, Whisper, and Cohere Transcribe compared on accuracy, languages, streaming, diarization, and price so you can pick the right speech-to-text model.
GPT Transcribe ranked against Whisper, gpt-4o-transcribe, ElevenLabs Scribe, Gemini 3 Pro, and Voxtral on accuracy, price, and the features it drops.
Parakeet TDT v3, the fast NVIDIA transcription model, silently translates French speech to English with up to 31% English intrusion on spontaneous recordings.