# Deepgram

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Deepgram and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Deepgram for accurate speech-to-text, diarization and low latency, with a free tier for personal use. Its text-to-speech is seen as weaker than some rivals.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong speech-to-text and diarization (3 comments): "Deepgram is really good for diorization. And speech to text, but they're not as good as the others for text to speech." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790945)) "deepgram seems really good (esp Enhanced and Nova 3 models)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603615)) "have models that are genuinely good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48531184))
- Top choice among speech APIs (3 comments): "I've found Deepgram to be the most pragmatic choice lately" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46773225)) "others do it very well, like Soniox and Deepgram" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473649)) "Deepgram does that wonderfully." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48017487))
- Lower latency than alternatives (2 comments): "We moved a similar stack to Deepgram recently and the latency is significantly better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788193)) "hooked up for a better voice to text experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581078))

## What people warn about

- Weaker than rivals at text-to-speech (2 comments): "Deepgram is really good for diorization. And speech to text, but they're not as good as the others for text to speech." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790945)) "It really does do way better than Deepgram and others." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47227376))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenAI Whisper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper.md): 164 recommend
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/parakeet.md): 144 recommend
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-transcribe-2.md): 69 recommend
- [Moonshine open-weights STT models](https://hackerapproved.com/p/moonshine.md): 37 recommend
- [whisper.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper-cpp.md): 33 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://deepgram.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Deepgram", https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepgram/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).