Design a real-time transcription system for thousands of concurrent audio streams.
Real-time transcription at scale tests streaming ASR, latency budgets, and GPU fleet management under heavy concurrency. The signal is streaming chunked inference with partial results, not batch transcription. Here is the design.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Real-time transcription at scale tests streaming ASR, latency budgets, and GPU fleet management under heavy concurrency. The signal is streaming chunked inference with partial results, not batch transcription. Here is the design.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.