Deepgram Base model — high volume, cost-effective
19 languages · benchmarked
Base is a speech-to-text model from Deepgram. In our standardized benchmarks it reaches 25.04% word error rate, ranking #32 of 35 models tested. It supports 19 languages and runs at $0.015/min — a premium option.
Its nearest benchmarked alternative is Soniox STT (Async). Best suited for multi-speaker conversations.
Overall Score
65.2
#32 of 35
Word Error Rate
25.04%
Character Error Rate
18.09%
Match Error Rate
24.46%
Word Info Lost
33.51%
Avg Latency
772ms
Benchmarks Run
34
last 30 runs
Word error rate
25.04%
↓ 55.4% · 30d
3 runs ago
latest
Avg latency
772ms
↓ 27.1% · 30d
3 runs ago
latest
overall WER · 35 models
Base
field · 34 models
lower-left is better
8 categories
WER
lower is better
Technical
8.8%
Legal
9.3%
Finance
10.4%
Medical
13.1%
Conversational
14.0%
General
24.8%
Noisy Environment
34.2%
Code-Switching
78.3%
5 accents
Rate
$0.0145
/min
Per-second billing. Bring your own provider key and pay your provider directly — a 5% routing fee applies (first 100 min/mo free).
Set up BYOKCost estimator
1 hour
$0.87
10 hours
$8.71
100 hours
$87.12
1,000 hours
$871.20
Billed per second of audio processed.
Model ID
deepgram/base
Authenticate every request with your secret API key as a Bearer token. Issue a key from your dashboard.
Use it with your agent
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or any agent with a shell. It installs the CLI and the OpenTranscription skill, then transcribes with this model.
Quickstart
Upload your audio, create a job with this model, then poll the job or set a webhook_url to be notified when it completes.
Key parameters
file_path
string
required
Storage path returned by the upload step.
model
string
required
The model to run this job on.
models
string[]
Ordered fallback chain: primary first, then backups tried in order if a provider fails.
language
string
ISO 639-1 language code. Omit to auto-detect.
diarization
boolean
Label speakers (A, B, …) in the output.
custom_words
string[]
Names, jargon and product terms to bias the model toward. Up to 1000 entries.
vocabulary_list_id
uuid
A vocabulary list saved in your workspace. Merged with custom_words when both are sent.
webhook_url
string
HTTPS URL notified with the result when the job completes. Delivered events are signed (X-OT-Signature).
title
string
Display name for this job in the dashboard. Falls back to the file name.
Response
A completed job returns the transcript in the OpenTranscription Unified Schema (OTUS).
Webhooks — skip polling
We POST a signed event to your webhook_url when a job completes or fails; verify the X-OT-Signature (HMAC-SHA256, reject if older than 300 s) and dedupe on the event id, then fetch the full transcript via GET /api/v1/transcriptions/{id}.
Rate-limited per tier — see the X-RateLimit-* response headers.
Full API referenceSupported Languages
Supported Formats
Features
Limits
Max file size
2 GB
Max duration
No documented limit