Gladia
the only vendor here that makes not training on your audio the contractual default, with diarization thrown in free.
the most expensive entry rate here and the only data policy you don't have to negotiate for — which for most regulated work settles it.
gladia states that it does not train on your audio, that this is the default rather than an upgrade, and that it is verifiable in the data processing agreement. every rival either trains by default with an opt-out you have to find, or declines to say. if the recordings belong to your customers rather than to you, that difference is the product.
diarization is included at every tier at no extra charge, where deepgram charges $0.12 an hour for it and assemblyai up to $0.12 on top of streaming. 100+ languages with mid-sentence language switching, and a self-reported 9.6% word error rate on real english audio for its solaria-3 model.
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
- $0.61/hr
- website
- gladia.io
the most expensive entry rate here and the only data policy you don't have to negotiate for — which for most regulated work settles it.
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.
more speech-to-text apis
AssemblyAI
we checked this$0.15/hrcheapest managed batch transcription, quoted in the right unit — with streaming billed by the clock, not the audio.
ElevenLabs Scribe
we checked this$0.22/hrtop of the independent accuracy leaderboard at $0.22 an hour — or nine times that if you pay the wrong way.