An apparatus includes processor(s) to: generate a set of candidate n-grams based on probability distributions from an acoustic model for candidate graphemes of a next word most likely spoken following at least one preceding word spoken within speech audio; provide the set of candidate n-grams to multiple devices; provide, to each node device, an indication of which candidate n-grams are to be searched for within the n-gram corpus by each node device to enable searches for multiple candidate n-grams to be performed, independently and at least partially in parallel, across the node devices; receive, from each node device, an indication of a probability of occurrence of at least one candidate n-gram within the speech audio; based on the received probabilities of occurrence, identify the next word most likely spoken within the speech audio; and add the next word most likely spoken to a transcript of the speech audio.