Tarush Agarwal reported a speech-to-text benchmark of 15 models on the same audio and pipeline. On 1,000 read-aloud clips from Pipecat FLEURS, AssemblyAI Universal 3.5 Pro had a 1.93% word error rate and a 489 ms median time to first text, both the best results in that test.
Artificial Analysis reports a transcription speed factor of 88x real time for StepAudio 3 ASR, behind three faster systems, near ElevenLabs Scribe v2 and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, and ahead of Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview.
Artificial Analysis says StepFun’s StepAudio 3 ASR is available through the StepFun API for non-streaming transcription, scoring 1.7% WER on the AA-WER Index, tied with Alibaba’s Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview and down from 4.7% for StepAudio 2.5 ASR. It transcribes at 88x real time and costs $0.40 per hour.
