Speech-to-text and transcription for AI agents
16 APIs compared on price, free tier, MCP support and real usage. Prices from the vendors' pricing pages, checked Oct 9, 2026.
| 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... |
— | — | |
| OpenAI Speech-to-Text Transcription and live transcription models (gpt-transcribe, gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe) via the OpenAI API. |
— | gpt-4o-mini-transcribe $0.003/min; gpt-transcribe $0.0045/min;... | — | — | |
| Whisper (self-hosted) OpenAI's open-source speech recognition model: multilingual transcription and translation you run yourself. |
Free (open source, MIT) | Free plan | — | — | |
| faster-whisper Whisper reimplemented on CTranslate2: faster and lighter on memory, with 8-bit quantization (per the project). |
Free (open source, MIT) | Free plan | — | — | |
| whisper.cpp C/C++ port of Whisper that runs on CPUs, Apple Silicon and GPUs, without Python. |
Free (open source, MIT) | Free plan | — | — | |
| Rev Transcription and investigative intelligence platform with AI and human transcription services. |
45 AI transcription & caption minutes/month | Free plan · paid from $25.49/mo | — | — | |
| Sonix Transcribes and translates audio and video files into text in 54+ languages. |
30 minutes free per new account | Free plan · paid from $10/mo | — | — | |
| Speechmatics Speech to text transcription from audio or video files and live streams. |
$100 in credits | Free plan then $0.12/hr for pre-recorded audio (Melia 1 model) |
— | — | |
| Voicegain Speech-to-text API with diarization, PII redaction, and custom vocabulary for batch and streaming. |
$50 credit on signup, no credit card required | Free plan then $0.00020 per second of audio |
— | — | |
| Azure AI Speech (speech-to-text) Transcribe audio in real time, in batch or via fast transcription, with optional custom speech models. |
Real-time Transcription: 5 audio hours free per month | Free plan then Standard: real-time $1.00 per hour, batch $0.18 per... |
— | — | MCP |
| IBM Watson Speech to Text Transcribe audio to text with pre-trained or customized speech models on IBM Cloud. |
500 minutes per month (Lite plan, no customization) | Free plan then Plus: $0.02 per minute (1 to 999,999 minutes/month);... |
— | — |
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