IBM Watson Speech to Text by IBM

Transcribe audio to text with pre-trained or customized speech models on IBM Cloud.

Price

Free plan

then from $0.01 per minute

Free tier

Yes

500 minutes per month (Lite plan, no customization)

SDK downloads

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npm ibm-watson · PyPI ibm-watson

Status

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Pricing

Free tier	500 minutes per month (Lite plan, no customization)
Cheapest paid plan	—
Usage price	Plus: $0.02 per minute (1 to 999,999 minutes/month); $0.01 per minute (1,000,000+ minutes/month)
Good to know	Premium plan is sold through IBM sales. The Standard plan is no longer available for new purchases.

From the official pricing page, checked Oct 10, 2026. Prices change: confirm before you buy.

API	Free	Price	SDK downloads / wk	GitHub stars	MCP
ElevenLabs Text-to-speech, speech-to-text (Scribe), voice cloning and conversational voice-agent APIs.	Free plan: 10,000 TTS characters/month (v4)	Free plan · paid from $6/mo	3.2M	3,135	MCP
Deepgram Real-time and batch speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent APIs.	$200 credit, no credit card	Free plan then Nova-3 streaming $0.0048/min (promo; regular $0.0077);...	1.7M	469	MCP
AssemblyAI Speech-to-text API (batch and streaming) with diarization, speech understanding and voice agents.	Up to 185 hours pre-recorded and 333 hours...	Free plan then Universal-2 $0.15/hour; Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hour;...	1.3M	213	MCP
Cartesia Low-latency text-to-speech (Sonic), speech-to-text (Ink) and managed voice agents.	20K credits/month + $1 prepaid for agents	Free plan · paid from $5/mo	286K	134	MCP
Gladia Multilingual speech-to-text API with real-time and async transcription.	50€ in free credits (one-time, ~80+ hours...	Free plan then Async at $0.61/hr, Real-time at $0.75/hr (Starter);...	—	—
Groq Speech-to-Text (Whisper) Hosted Whisper Large V3 and V3 Turbo transcription and translation, billed per hour of audio.	Free tier with rate limits (25 MB files)	Free plan then Whisper Large V3 Turbo $0.04/hour; Whisper Large V3...	—	—