What’s a good alternative to Whisper for production transcription?

A few good production alternatives to Whisper, depending on your priorities:

Strong managed options

• Deepgram — Often a top pick for production. Fast, scalable, good real-time transcription, diarization, punctuation, word-level timestamps, and decent APIs.
• AssemblyAI — Strong transcription quality plus extra features like summarization, chapters, sentiment, topic detection, and speaker labels.
• Google Speech-to-Text — Very solid at scale, especially if you’re already in GCP.
• AWS Transcribe — Good enterprise choice, easy if you’re already on AWS, with streaming and batch support.
• Azure Speech to Text — Comparable enterprise option with tight Microsoft ecosystem integration.

Good self-hosted / open-source alternatives

• NVIDIA NeMo / Canary models — Good if you need to run locally or in your own cloud with more control.
• wav2vec 2.0 / HuBERT-based models — Useful for custom fine-tuning, though more engineering work.
• SeamlessM4T — More geared toward multilingual speech and translation, but worth considering for some use cases.

If you care about production reliability most

I’d usually shortlist:

1. Deepgram
2. AssemblyAI
3. Google Speech-to-Text
4. AWS Transcribe

Quick recommendation

• Need best developer experience + streaming + scalability: Deepgram
• Need rich post-processing features: AssemblyAI
• Need enterprise cloud-native integration: AWS / Google / Azure
• Need self-hosted control: NeMo-based solutions

If you tell me your use case — e.g. batch vs live, language(s), cost sensitivity, or whether you need diarization — I can recommend the best fit more precisely.