Whisper
A widely deployed multilingual transcription and translation model.
Full Whisper record →Head to head
Whisper vs AssemblyAI
Whisper (OpenAI) and AssemblyAI (AssemblyAI) 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 | Whisper OpenAI | AssemblyAI AssemblyAI |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | Audio | Audio |
| Version | whisper-1 | Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime |
| Entry cost | Pricing not specified on page | Free tier · from $0.15/1M tok |
| Pricing tiers | Open Source Model free | 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 |
| Model stack | gpt-transcribe · Whisper · Whisper large-v3 · whisper-1 | 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 |
| Context window | 30 second windows | n/a |
| Public API | ||
| Routes models | ||
| Changes / 30d | 2 | 8 |
| Origin | Global | Global |
| Capabilities | 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 | Speaker diarization, Summarisation, Topic detection, PII redaction, LeMUR framework, Pre-recorded STT, Real-time STT, Voice Agent API |
AssemblyAI
Transcription plus summarisation, topic detection and speaker labels for developers.
Full AssemblyAI record →