AssemblyAI
Transcription plus summarisation, topic detection and speaker labels for developers.
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AssemblyAI vs Whisper
AssemblyAI (AssemblyAI) and Whisper (OpenAI) both sit in Audio. Whisper is the cheaper entry point at Pricing not specified on page. AssemblyAI shipped more tracked changes in the last 30 days (8 vs 2). Every value below comes from the latest crawl of the vendors' own pages.
| Attribute | AssemblyAI AssemblyAI | Whisper OpenAI |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Audio | Audio |
| Version | Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime | whisper-1 |
| Entry cost | Free tier · from $0.15/1M tok | Pricing not specified on page |
| Pricing tiers | Free Credits free · Universal-2 Async STT $0.15 · Universal-Streaming English / Multilingual $0.15 · Universal-3.5 Pro Async STT $0.21 · Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime STT $0.45 · Text-to-Speech (AssemblyAI-TTS-1) $15 | Open Source Model free |
| Model stack | AssemblyAI-TTS-1 · Claude · Claude 4.6 Sonnet · Claude 4.8 Opus · Gemini 2.5 Pro · Gemini 3.5 Flash · GPT-5.5 · Qwen3 Next 80B A3B · u3-rt-pro · Universal-2 · universal-3-6-pro · universal-3-pro · Universal-3.5 Pro · Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime · Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime · Universal-Streaming English · Universal-Streaming Multilingual | gpt-transcribe · Whisper · Whisper large-v3 · whisper-1 |
| Context window | n/a | 30 second windows |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 8 | 2 |
| Origin | Global | Global |
| Capabilities | Speaker diarization, Summarisation, Topic detection, PII redaction, LeMUR framework, Pre-recorded STT, Real-time STT, Voice Agent API | 99 languages, Translation to English, Word timestamps, Open weights, Robust to noise, File transcription, Language detection, Support for mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpga, m4a, wav, and webm formats |
Whisper
A widely deployed multilingual transcription and translation model.
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