u/Sad_Task604

Hey,

I’m building a voice agent with Vapi using German + Swiss German, and running into a few issues:

• Audio works fine
• STT misses simple words (even “hello”)
• Dialects/accents make it worse
• Sometimes the agent doesn’t respond at all
• There’s also noticeable delay

Feels like either model choice / language config / VAD is off.

Questions:

• Best STT model for German + Swiss German?
• Better to force de-DE or use auto-detect?
• Any tips for handling dialects reliably?
• How do you reduce latency in these setups?

Would love to hear what worked for others 🙏