Microsoft's VibeVoice 9B achieves best open-source medical speech recognition at 8.34% WER, though it requires substantial computational resources and processing time.

Microsoft VibeVoice-ASR 9B now leads open-source models for medical speech-to-text with 8.34% WER, nearly matching Gemini 2.5 Pro's 8.15%

The model requires ~18GB VRAM and processes audio slowly at 97 seconds per file, compared to 6 seconds for Parakeet

Benchmark expanded from 26 to 31 models, with new entrants including ElevenLabs Scribe v2 (9.72% WER) and NVIDIA Nemotron Speech Streaming 0.6B (11.06% WER)

Researcher discovered bugs in Whisper's text normalizer that were artificially inflating WER scores by 2-3% across all tested models

All code and results are open-source for the third iteration of this medical speech recognition benchmark