The fastest, lowest-cost batch transcription with Qwen3-ASR

Baseten optimized Qwen3-ASR 1.7B, an Apache 2.0 open-weight speech recognition model supporting over 30 languages and 22 Chinese dialects with a 5.4% average WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard, for batch transcription on a single RTX PRO 6000. The optimized stack transcribes 7x more audio per second than out-of-the-box vLLM at high concurrency, reaching 2,645x real-time factor on 5-minute clips and 3,128x on hour-long files, with median latency for 5-minute clips at 64 concurrent requests falling from 50 seconds to 7.3 seconds. Baseten reports a cost of about $0.0013 per audio hour, 8x lower than the same model on vanilla vLLM and roughly 277x less than popular closed-weight providers.