When you talk to an assistant, should it wait for your whole sentence before answering, or start figuring it out as you speak? That's a real engineering choice, and it changes how fast and smart your app feels. Let's race the two ways.
Press Speak. Streaming shows words the instant it hears them (low latency). Batch waits for you to finish, then shows everything at once. Watch the timers — and try a longer sentence!
Our race was a simulation of the idea. Here are the real models engineers actually reach for:
Whisper is the famous one — it reads the whole clip. ✅ Top accuracy. ⚠️ Waits until you finish, so higher latency.
Special designs (RNN-Transducer, streaming Conformer) emit words as you speak. ✅ Low latency for live captions/assistants. ⚠️ Slightly less accurate.
A model that decides "you're done talking now" better than a silence timer — so replies feel natural, not cut-off or slow.
You learned the streaming vs batch trade-off and why latency matters — the difference between an assistant that feels instant and one that makes you wait.