Most speech-model benchmarks are in English. The Russian ones I found rarely say what hardware a number was taken on, which license the weights carry, or what broke during installation. Russian is also a harder target than the headline English models suggest: the Cyrillic alphabet, rich morphology, and everyday speech full of English tech terms that have to come out in the right script. If you ship anything for Russian speakers, you end up having to measure for yourself.

I needed a voice agent that understands Russian speech over the phone and answers out loud (the project is ru-voice-agent ). I installed and measured everything I could get running: recognition, synthesis and turn detection. The results, scripts and license checks are in ru-speech-bench . This post covers recognition: what I got on a plain CPU with no GPU, and why I don't put WER in the table.

First, the constraints, because they determine how to read the numbers.…