AssemblyAI
cheapest managed batch transcription, quoted in the right unit — with streaming billed by the clock, not the audio.
the best price-to-capability ratio here and the only vendor already quoting in dollars per hour — spoiled by a streaming meter that runs on silence.
$0.15 an hour on universal-2 and $0.21 on the newer universal-3.5 pro are the cheapest fully-managed batch rates among the pure-play vendors, and assemblyai is refreshingly the only one that publishes in dollars per hour rather than making you convert. 99+ languages on streaming.
the streaming gotcha is worth a paragraph of anyone's attention: real-time is billed by how long the websocket stays open, not by how much audio you send. an hour-long connection carrying thirty minutes of speech bills a full hour. for a call-centre application with hold music and silence, the effective rate is well above the quoted $0.45.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- speech-to-text apis
- pricing
- $0.15/hr
- website
- assemblyai.com
the best price-to-capability ratio here and the only vendor already quoting in dollars per hour — spoiled by a streaming meter that runs on silence.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.