Local speech-to-text server: how to move away from cloud solutions

The authors share their experience of transitioning from the Yandex SpeechKit cloud service to their own local infrastructure for speech recognition. Following the end of their partnership with Yandex Kazakhstan, the company sought alternatives for its speech analytics system. The primary drivers for this shift were client demands for data security and the poor performance of cloud solutions in recognizing Kazakh and Uzbek languages. Experiments revealed that using local GPUs provides significantly higher transcription quality for these languages compared to cloud-based APIs. Although local solutions require more computational resources, the authors emphasize that this transition allowed them to improve data processing accuracy and offer a more reliable, independent product to their clients. The article frames this transition as an opportunity for technological growth and service enhancement.