title: Building a Free Arabic Speech-to-Text Engine using Hugging Face & Next.js

` Hello fellow developers! 👋 Handling audio processing in web applications is always tricky, but when you add Arabic dialects and academic terminology (Arabizi) to the mix, it becomes a real engineering challenge. Recently, while building Adawati.app (an all-in-one digital workspace for Arab students), I needed to implement a reliable Speech-to-Text (STT) feature for university lectures. Paid APIs like Google Cloud or AWS were either too expensive for a free tool or struggled heavily with local Arabic dialects. Here is how I engineered a custom, free solution using Hugging Face open-source models. 🛑 The Technical Bottlenecks Large File Uploads & Timeouts: University lectures are often 1-2 hours long. Sending a 100MB audio file to a server in one go usually results in a 504 Gateway Timeout . Background Noise: Lecture halls are noisy. Passing raw audio to an AI model drastically reduces transcription accuracy. Dialect Nuances: Standard Arabic models fail when professors mix English techn