AssemblyAI
Listed at https://www.assemblyai.com
Overall Rank #30 ⭐ Consider
❌ Proxy required (US-based infrastructure, CN direct access unreliable) | 🌍 International
💰 Token Pricing
| Type | Price | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Input | 按音频小时计费：Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hr、Universal-2 $0.15/hr（pre-recorded） | per million tokens |
| Output | N/A（speech-to-text 计费基于音频时长，无 token 概念） | per million tokens |
| Cache Read | N/A（实时音频不可缓存） | Discounted |
💡 Free Credits:
🤖 Supported Models (9)
Universal-3.5 Pro (Async, 18 languages, native code switching, best diarization)Universal-2 (Async, 99 languages, balanced accuracy)Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime (Streaming, sub-300ms latency)Universal-Streaming (cost-effective streaming)Nano (sync, low-latency short audio)Voice Agent API (end-to-end real-time voice agents)Speech Understanding (sentiment, summarization, IAB categories, entity detection)LLM Gateway (Universal-2 / Claude / OpenAI routing)Guardrails (PII / profanity / brand safety for real-time audio)
✨ Pros
- ✓Universal-3.5 Pro leads ElevenLabs / Deepgram on multilingual + code-switching + far-field accuracy
- ✓Generous free tier: 185 hr/mo pre-recorded + 333 hr/mo streaming — among the largest in the industry
- ✓Streaming concurrency auto-scales with no concurrency-fee ceiling — startup-friendly, scales with usage
- ✓Speaker Diarization + Speaker Identification built in-house (not third-party)
- ✓One-stop Audio Intelligence: sentiment, summaries, IAB categories, entity detection, PII redaction
- ✓AWS Marketplace integration: consolidates billing with AWS account
⚠️ Cons
- ×Speech-only (ASR / Audio Intelligence); no general LLM offerings except LLM Gateway routing
- ×No first-party TTS (Voice Agent API partners with other providers)
- ×Pre-recorded pricing is 2x self-hosted Whisper; accuracy advantage has to justify the cost
- ×Speaker Diarization only on Universal-3.5 Pro / Universal-Streaming — not Universal-2
- ×No ICP filing for China; CN enterprise deployments require partner module or overseas gateway
🎯 Best For
Real-time meeting transcription / contact-center QA / voice agents / multilingual captioning & media monitoring / medical-legal transcription