Enterprises are increasingly shifting from batch to real-time transcription to enhance customer experience, productivity, and compliance monitoring, which highlights the limitations of OpenAI's Whisper and the advantages of Deepgram Nova-3. While Whisper, despite its popularity and cost-effectiveness for offline tasks, lacks true streaming support, Deepgram Nova-3 is designed for real-time applications, offering native streaming, built-in diarization, and multilingual capabilities with sub-300ms latency. This streaming-first approach makes Nova-3 more suitable for real-time demands in sectors like contact centers, healthcare, and finance, providing a more integrated and cost-effective solution when considering total cost of ownership (TCO). Though Whisper appears free, the operational and infrastructural costs of implementing a multi-model pipeline diminish its cost benefits. Nova-3's superior performance in both real-time and batch transcription, combined with its comprehensive feature set, positions it as the preferred choice for enterprises seeking to future-proof their voice infrastructure.