Glossary → Transcription & speech recognition
Transcription & speech recognition

Greedy decoding

Greedy decoding is the fastest way for a speech model to produce text: at every step it emits the single most probable next token, never revisiting earlier choices.

Greedy decoding is standard when speed matters — live captions, quick drafts — and its errors are usually local. Beam search reconsiders alternatives and wins on ambiguous audio at a compute cost.

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