All tasks / Voice & audio / Transcription
Best AI APIs for transcription
Models you can call through a paid API, ranked from public benchmarks, with their price in this task’s unit.
STop ranked: MAI-Transcribe-2 (preview) (Microsoft AI), 2% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming).30 options listed · data verified 19 Oct 2026
Ranked list
| Tier | Name | Approach | Runs | Rated by | Price | Skill | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S |  MAI-Transcribe-2 (preview)Microsoft AI | Models | Cloud | 2% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0017/min of audio | — | |
| S |  Scribe v2ElevenLabs | Models | Cloud | 2.2% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0037/min of audio | — | vs MAI-Transcribe-2 (preview) |
| S |  Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0xAI | Models | Cloud | 2.3% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0017/min of audio | — | vs MAI-Transcribe-2 (preview) |
| S |  StepAudio 3 ASRStepFun | Models | Cloud | 2.5% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0067/min of audio | — | vs MAI-Transcribe-2 (preview) |
| S |  Gemini 3.5 TranscribeGoogle | Models | Cloud | 2.6% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0050/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Ink-2Cartesia | Models | Cloud | 3.4% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER Streaming | $0.0040/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Scribe V2 ProZoom | Models | Cloud | 2.8% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0033/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Saaras v4Sarvam AI | Models | Cloud | 3.5% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER Streaming | $0.0052/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Voxtral Small (24B-2507)Mistral AI | Models | Local | 2.8% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | ~55 GB VRAM | — | |
| A |  Universal-3.6 Pro StreamingAssemblyAI | Models | Cloud | 3.6% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER Streaming | $0.0075/min of audio | — | |
| A | Gemini 3.1 Pro (Preview) Google | Models | Cloud | 2.8% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.02/min of audio | — | |
| A | Universal-3.5 Pro AssemblyAI | Models | Cloud | 3% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0035/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Solaria-3Gladia | Models | Cloud | 3.2% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.01/min of audio | — | |
| A |  GPT-TranscribeOpenAI | Models | Cloud | 3.3% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0045/min of audio | — | |
| A |  PulseSmallest.ai | Models | Cloud | 3.3% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0050/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Resonant-1Reson8 | Models | Cloud | 3.4% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0036/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Muse Voice TranscribeMeta | Models | Cloud | 6.3% on Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard (English, short-form average WER) | $0.0030/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 (v26.02)Mistral AI | Models | Cloud | 3.6% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0030/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Soniox v5 (stt-rt-v5 / async)Soniox | Models | Cloud | 3.8% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0017/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Inworld STT 1Inworld AI | Models | Cloud | 3.9% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0025/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Whisper large-v3OpenAI | Models | Local | 4.1% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | ~10 GB VRAM | — | |
| A |  Amazon TranscribeAmazon | Models | Cloud | 4.1% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0060/min of audio | — | |
| A |  Modulate STT (batch)Modulate | Models | Cloud | 4.2% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.00042/min of audio | — | |
| B |  Canary-Qwen-2.5BNVIDIA | Models | Local | 4.3% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | ~6 GB VRAM | — | |
| B |  Chirp 3Google | Models | Cloud | 4.3% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.02/min of audio | — | |
| B | Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 NVIDIA | Models | Local | 4.5% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | ~2 GB VRAM | — | |
| B |  Nova-3Deepgram | Models | Cloud | 4.8% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0043/min of audio | — | |
| B |  Melia 1Speechmatics | Models | Cloud | 4.9% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.0040/min of audio | — | |
| C | Flux (English / Multilingual) Deepgram | Models | Cloud | 7.4% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER Streaming | $0.0065/min of audio | — | |
| C |  Gradium Speech-to-TextGradium | Models | Cloud | 6.8% on Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming) | $0.01/min of audio | — |
Tiers come only from public benchmarks (Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER v2 (non-streaming), Artificial Analysis Speech to Text: AA-WER Streaming, Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard (English, short-form average WER)); tools without a result of their own inherit the tier of the best model they offer. How we rank.