Vatis Tech

Vatis is the European answer for products with serious EU-language coverage needs. If your audio is Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, or one of the other Central and Eastern European languages that Whisper and the major US-headquartered cloud ASRs still handle as second-tier, Vatis is worth a real benchmark before defaulting to a US vendor.

The accuracy gains on those languages can be meaningful, particularly on conversational content and accented speech, where models trained primarily on English-language corpora struggle. The company has invested in local-language training data in a way Whisper has not yet matched on these specific languages.

GDPR-native data residency is the second selling point. All processing happens in EU data centres, which simplifies the compliance conversation for European customers in a way US-hosted ASR cannot. The API is straightforward, with both batch and (more limited) streaming options, and the dashboard is English-friendly for non-Romanian-speaking developers integrating against the service.

The trade-offs are recognition and ecosystem. English accuracy is competitive but not ahead of Deepgram or AssemblyAI; if English is your only language, stay with the bigger names.

Vatis is a smaller brand outside Europe, so finding tutorials, third-party SDKs, and integration partners takes more effort. For its niche it's a real choice.