ElevenLabs Scribe
top of the independent accuracy leaderboard at $0.22 an hour — or nine times that if you pay the wrong way.
the most accurate option here by an independent measure, at a genuinely low rate, sitting behind a billing choice that can cost you nine times more for identical output.
scribe v2 ranks first for word error rate on artificial analysis's aa-agenttalk dataset at 1.5% — an independent leaderboard result rather than an elevenlabs claim, which is rare enough in this category to be the headline. diarization handles up to 32 speakers with per-word and per-character timestamps, plus audio-event tagging for things like laughter and music.
the billing trap is severe and easy to walk into. pay-as-you-go is $0.22 an hour. paying with the credits bundled into a subscription costs about $1.98 an hour, because scribe burns 330 credits per minute and those credit pools are sized for text-to-speech character volume rather than transcription minutes. same model, same output, nine times the cost, and the plan page won't tell you.
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
- $0.22/hr
- website
- elevenlabs.io
the most accurate option here by an independent measure, at a genuinely low rate, sitting behind a billing choice that can cost you nine times more for identical output.
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.