Groq vs OpenAI Whisper: Real Benchmarks for Voice Transcription (2026)

I've been building dictate.app — a Windows dictation tool — and the biggest decision early on was which Whisper API to use. I ran both Groq and OpenAI through real-world testing. Here's what the numbers actually look like. Why Whisper APIs, Not Local Models Local Whisper (running on your machine) is free but slow unless you have a GPU. For a dictation tool where latency is everything, you want a hosted API. The two main options in 2026 are OpenAI's Whisper endpoint and Groq's Whisper endpoint. B