Deepgram
Ranked 17 of 25 speech recognition models by recommenders
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.
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.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 80%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong speech-to-text and diarization
“Deepgram is really good for diorization. And speech to text, but they're not as good as the others for text to speech.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: CLI for text-to-speech using OpenAI/Deepgram/Elevenlabs” “deepgram seems really good (esp Enhanced and Nova 3 models).”
Comment from 1 Apr 2026 in “Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition” “have models that are genuinely good”
Comment from 14 Jun 2026 in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)” Top choice among speech APIs
“I've found Deepgram to be the most pragmatic choice lately”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: CLI for text-to-speech using OpenAI/Deepgram/Elevenlabs” “others do it very well, like Soniox and Deepgram”
Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in “Gemini-3.5-Transcribe” “Deepgram does that wonderfully.”
Comment from 5 May 2026 in “How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale” Lower latency than alternatives
“We moved a similar stack to Deepgram recently and the latency is significantly better”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “We Built Our IVR Scraper (and What Broke Along the Way)” “hooked up for a better voice to text experience”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “LLMs as a Cognitive Virus”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weaker than rivals at text-to-speech
“Deepgram is really good for diorization. And speech to text, but they're not as good as the others for text to speech.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: CLI for text-to-speech using OpenAI/Deepgram/Elevenlabs” “It really does do way better than Deepgram and others.”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch”
Other speech recognition models people recommend
The four most recommended other speech recognition models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper | 164 | 53 | 76% | 12 | — | Approved |
| NVIDIA Parakeet | 144 | 27 | 84% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Mistral Voxtral | 69 | 27 | 72% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Moonshine open-weights STT models | 37 | 13 | 74% | 7 | — | Approved |
| DeepgramThis page | 8 | 2 | 80% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
11 of the 12 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“This is the main reason I lean on Deepgram over local services.”
“hooked up for a better voice to text experience”
“others do it very well, like Soniox and Deepgram”
“have models that are genuinely good”
“Deepgram does that wonderfully.”
“deepgram seems really good (esp Enhanced and Nova 3 models).”
“It really does do way better than Deepgram and others.”
“Deepgram is really good for diorization. And speech to text, but they're not as good as the others for text to speech.”
“We moved a similar stack to Deepgram recently and the latency is significantly better”
“I've found Deepgram to be the most pragmatic choice lately”
“their free tier is basically unlimited for personal use, so $0 forever”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.