October 3, 2025
A new transcription model from @DeepgramAI launched today: Flux.
Flux is completely free for all of October, and is integrated into Pipecat and Pipecat Cloud.
This model shows where speech recognition is headed, as speech models evolve to enable more and more voice agent use cases.
Deepgram has always been the market leader in very low latency transcription. (Which is critical for conversational voice!) My "magic number" here is 300ms. I want the finalized transcript to be delivered no more than 300ms after the user stops speaking.
One reason that 300ms is a good baseline number is that the open source native audio Smart Turn model that's used in a lot of voice agents makes a turn detection decision within 300ms. We want the transcript and the end-of-turn event to be available at the same time.
Of course, you might not need to use the Smart Turn model at all, anymore. Because Flux has quite good turn detection implemented directly in the model. It's great to see progress in turn detection, because good turn detection makes such a difference in the experience of talking to a voice agent.
Deepgram's blog post[1]
Pipecat Deepgram and Flux docs[2]
Using Flux (for free) in Pipecat cloud, no API key needed[3]