Gordey Zuev, Elena Kantonistova
We present a comparative analysis of eight managed commercial speech recognition providers (provider-side preprocessing, segmentation, and serving) for educational video transcription and enrichment, evaluated on over 700 lecture recordings (900+ hours) across disciplines. The Fireworks whisper-v3-turbo endpoint offers a favorable cost–quality–latency trade-off versus surveyed alternatives. Audio preprocessing reduces billed duration by 10–25% with negligible accuracy loss. Prompt-based “Video Vocabulary” reduces terminology errors without fine-tuning. We implement a parallel pipeline that cuts end-to-end turnaround from over 30 minutes of manual effort per recording to under two minutes, supports up to 50 concurrent jobs, and achieves roughly 22× speedup at about $0.075 per hour of content for transcription plus pedagogical enrichment (summaries, chapter topics, self-check questions) at list prices. The system is deployed in production.