Real-time transcription using streaming speech recognition offers sub-300 millisecond latency, enabling systems to capture, transmit, and decode live audio swiftly for natural interactions. This technology relies on persistent WebSocket connections to handle live audio in 100-200 millisecond chunks, preventing the latency issues caused by traditional HTTP requests. Streaming APIs like Deepgram's dynamically adjust chunk sizes based on network conditions, maintaining optimal performance across various settings, such as healthcare and aviation. Challenges in production include managing network failures, scaling to handle thousands of concurrent sessions, and ensuring accuracy amidst noisy environments. Features like interim results, endpointing, utterance-end detection, and speaker diarization enhance user experience and compliance. Testing with real-world audio and monitoring performance metrics like latency percentiles are crucial for maintaining system reliability. Deepgram emphasizes engineering solutions for buffering, connection recovery, and scaling to ensure that streaming speech recognition performs predictably under pressure, making it a dependable infrastructure rather than a hopeful feature.