London Speech Recognition Meetup Group

Should you just pay Deepgram or AssemblyAI and call it a day? Or is it time to spin up your own Faster-Whisper cluster on AWS?
This is an open roundtable where we’re going to look at the math and the trade-offs of the current STT landscape. We’ll be discussing:

• The Real Cost: When does the API bill become more expensive than the engineering time to self-host?
• The "VIBE" Check: Which open-source models are actually production-ready in 2026?
• Privacy & Compliance: When does "on-prem" become a requirement rather than a choice?

If you’re currently stuck in a spreadsheet trying to pick a provider, or you just finished migrating from one to another, come tell us why you did it.