Benchmarks · October 2026
Tested on a real meeting.
Four people around a table, talking over each other, picked up by one microphone in the middle: the audio a phone actually hears. We ran it through Ditto on an iPhone 13 from 2021 and scored every result against a transcript written by people.
- Processing time
- 53 s
- to transcribe an hour-long meeting and work out who spoke
- First words
- 3 s
- until the first words of the transcript appear
- Speaker accuracy
- 93.3%
- of speech credited to the right person, with High accuracy speakers
Speed
Everything runs on the phone, so there is no upload and no server queue. We test on an older iPhone on purpose: an iPhone 13 finishes an hour-long meeting in 53 seconds with High accuracy.
- Peak memory
- 150 MB
- Thermal state
- Fair at peak
- Data sent
- None
The first recording after you install or update Ditto takes longer, while iOS prepares the speech models for your phone.
Words
Word error rate counts every word missed, added or misheard against the human transcript. High accuracy runs entirely on the phone and matches Ditto’s cloud transcription.
Why the numbers look high
A distant microphone in a four-way conversation is the hardest case for speech recognition. The people who transcribed this meeting wrote down every “yeah” and every word said over someone else, and most of what Ditto misses is exactly that: short replies and crosstalk, not the sentences you read back later. From the headset microphones, the same meeting scores 29.4% with High accuracy.
Speakers
Speaker error is the share of the meeting where Ditto gets wrong who is talking, or whether anyone is. Measured strictly over 16 meetings and 9 hours of audio, overlapping speech included.
Turn on High accuracy in Settings → Speakers. It works out how many people there are by itself; when you set the number of people, Ditto uses Standard. Either way, you can fix a label by hand, and once you name someone, Ditto recognizes their voice in later meetings.
Next to other apps
The same file, given to other transcription apps and services with their default settings. High accuracy makes the fewest word errors of all of them, and the fewest once speakers count too, without leaving the phone. Argmax Pro comes closest.
| App | Word error | Words + speakers error | People found |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ditto High accuracy iPhone 13 | 38.5% | 39.0% | 4 of 4 |
| Ditto Cloud (Pro) Cloud | 39.6% | 53.4% | 4 of 4 |
| Plaud Cloud | 40.1% | 62.4% | 4 of 4 |
| Argmax Pro iPhone 13 | 40.4% | 41.3% | 4 of 4 |
| Ditto On-device iPhone 13 | 48.5% | 57.8% | 4 of 4 |
| Deepgram Cloud | 62.5% | 71.0% | 4 of 4 |
| Gladia Cloud | 82.4% | 87.3% | 3 of 4 |
Ask your meetings
112 questions about 12 meetings, each answer checked against notes a person wrote about that meeting. A partly right answer counts as half. Answers take 2 to 3 seconds.
On-device answers need an iPhone with Apple Intelligence.
How we tested
- The meeting
- EN2002a from the AMI Meeting Corpus (CC BY 4.0): 35 minutes 42 seconds, four people, from the microphone array on the table. Every app got the same 16 kHz MP3, made from the original recording.
- The phone
- iPhone 13, release build of Ditto, October 2026. Speed was measured on a longer meeting from the same corpus and microphone, EN2001d (59 minutes 6 seconds). High accuracy means High accuracy for both the words and the speakers; On-device is the default. Speed and memory come from the app’s own diagnostics.
- Scoring words
- Both transcripts are lowercased, without punctuation or fillers such as “um” and “uh”, then compared word by word in time order. The human transcript has one entry per utterance, with speaker and start and end times in seconds, so you can score any app the same way.
- Scoring speakers
- The 16 meetings of the AMI test set, single distant microphone. No tolerance around the edges of each turn, and time when people overlap counts.
- Other apps
- Run by hand in October 2026, each on its own app or website with default settings, on the same file. Argmax Pro ran on the same iPhone 13.
- One meeting
- The comparison uses one hard meeting. It shows where each app stands on this kind of audio, not a ranking for every recording.
- Scoring answers
- Questions on 12 AMI meetings, written from human meeting notes. A language model grades each answer against those notes.
- Your meetings
- Results depend on the room, the microphone and how often people talk over each other. A headset, or a quiet room with fewer people, does better than this meeting.