Speechmatics vs AssemblyAI vs Deepgram vs Gladia
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Speechmatics
Speech-to-text API tuned for heavy accents and dialects
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AssemblyAI
Speech-to-text and audio intelligence API
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Deepgram
Real-time speech-to-text platform
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Gladia
Real-time audio intelligence API — multilingual transcription, speaker...
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8 / 10 | 7.8 / 10 | 8 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Enterprise | Paid | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | — | — | $200 free credit (one-time, no credit card required, no expiration) on the Pay As You Go plan | 10 hours/month free (async + real-time, no credit card required) |
| Paid from | — | — | Pay-as-you-go from $0.0048/min (Nova-3 Monolingual streaming) | From $0.61/hr async or $0.75/hr real-time (Starter pay-as-you-go) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — | 200,000+ developers | 300,000+ developers; ~2,000 enterprise/corporate customers (mid-2026) |
| Founded | 2006 | 2017 | 2015 | 2022 |
| Maker | — | — | — | OVH Groupe (acquired July 2026) |
| Verdict | This is infrastructure, not an app, you're calling an API or SDK, not clicking through a dashboard for casual use. What it's genuinely good at is holding up on messy real-world audio: strong accents, overlapping speakers... |
AssemblyAI is a developer-focused speech AI platform delivering accurate transcription plus audio-intelligence features like speaker diarization, summarisation, sentiment, topic detection, and PII redaction through a cle... |
Deepgram is the specialist pick for latency-sensitive voice applications. Nova-3 streams transcription from $0.0048/min with sub-300ms latency, and the Flux model (multilingual since April 2026) builds end-of-turn detect... |
Gladia's biggest 2026 development isn't a model release — it's the pending sale. OVH Groupe entered exclusive acquisition talks on June 11, 2026, to fold Gladia's speech-to-text stack into its sovereign-cloud AI Lab; ter... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.