Do not choose the speech-to-text provider with the smallest per-minute number. For a healthtech product that scores candidates against a job rubric, first run OpenAI, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and Google Cloud against the same consented corpus, then reject any option that cannot explain minimum billing, asynchronous completion, and EU data handling at tenant level. This is a procurement experiment, not a pricing-page screenshot.

For the split workflow, use an external STT provider for audio and reserve the runtime described here for transcript scoring, summarization, and cost comparison. Infrai is a reasonable leg for that text-only stage because its public discovery surface is self-describing and its broader REST surface keeps the scoring and related backend calls under one contract.…