Why Realtime Is the Future of Speech-to-Text

For most of the last decade, transcription was something you did after the fact. You recorded a call, dumped the file into a queue, waited a few minutes (or a few hours), and got back a block of text. That was the deal. Batch, async, post-hoc—whatever you want to call it, the audio was already over by the time the model saw it. And for a long time, that was fine, because that's all the technology could reliably do. Recently, the field has quietly crossed the line where the most interesting,…