Gemini-3.5-Transcribe

I’ve tested at least 20 STT models in a benchmark I’ve set up with German, Italian and English voices from meetings in my company. The voices contained very industry specific words, the languages changed from one sentence to another, sometimes words in a language were mentioned while a discussion was in another. The only local model that satisfies me is Voxtral Mini 3b, the only paid API that is slightly better is eleven labs. Yes, Voxtral might not reach the best score in the benchmarks, but to me, it just solves a problem. It might not be the best in terms of speed... but that’s not a problem for me. Happy to test this new model from Google but I’m not sure I’d go with that instead of something that can run so easily in my machine.

"Function calling: The model can delegate complex tasks (such as image generation and file analysis) to other Gemini models via function calls. Currently available in the Gemini macOS app." This confused the heck out of me because it makes it sound like the STT model can make function calls in order to execute arbitrary tasks, which wouldn't make any sense. The developer docs (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-tran...) confirm that the Gemini 3.5 Transcribe model cannot in fact make function calls. I guess the blog post is just using very confusing wording to describe how their consumer assistant/chatbot app can both take audio input via Gemini 3.5 Transcribe and then call other things as needed. Or maybe that bullet point was meant to be for a different model announcement and somebody made an editing error.

I've been testing it on Pixel 11 Pro and I mostly dislike it. It is convenient when you have something long to say without thinking about it first. But the main issue is when you want to say something precise with specific wording it might "simplify" it and break the meaning. Something like "I hesitated to check it, I should have verified" => "I should have verified" (The "I hesitated..." is removed but I said it because I wanted to let the person know that I thought about it earlier) I tried the sentence few times and it always removed the first part.

I personally tested all the STT models for my real-time translator (https://fliptalk.ai). From language detection and accuracy in a noisy environment to the most important point: latency. At the moment, Soniox STT v5 is definitely the best, and I'm impressed by its performance. It's good that Google released Gemini-3.5-Transcribe, and it beats every other model on accuracy, but it definitely needs a bit more work on latency, which is the most important factor for STT apps.

I'd certainly use Gemini API a lot more if I could figure out how to give them money and they give me tokens. The whole tier nonsense is just insane hoop jumping compared to their competition.