RTF in Speech AI Isn't Enough: Your 2026 Guide For Evaluating Batch Transcription
Real-time factor gets a lot of coverage in speech AI. It's clean, it's quotable, and it travels well on a marketing page. An RTF of 0.05x means the model handles one minute of audio in three seconds. That's genuinely useful information when you're comparing model architectures or evaluating compute costs.
But if RTF is the only metric in your evaluation, you're missing most of what determines whether a transcription service actually works in production.
This matters most for batch transcription, where the workflow stakes are highest. A contact centre processing thousands of calls overnight, a compliance team working through a backlog of recorded meetings before a regulatory deadline, a media team waiting on a transcript before post-production can begin. These users don't experience RTF. They experience a delay between submitting a file and receiving a transcript. That delay is shaped by factors RTF doesn't capture at all.
(Real-time transcription is...
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