AssemblyAI is a developer-first Speech AI platform that lets you add high-accuracy speech-to-text transcription and audio intelligence to your product via a simple API.
It supports features like speaker detection, sentiment analysis, and more—all with a clean developer experience. But as your use case becomes more complex, you may start to hit limitations.
Maybe you’re working with noisy, real-world audio and need better diarization. Or you’re building a multilingual app and find some dialects aren’t fully supported. Or perhaps you’re in a regulated industry that demands on-premise deployment or deeper model customization—features AssemblyAI doesn’t currently offer.
If you’re looking for a reliable way to explore and compare some affordable applications instead, you’ve come to the right place!
From better language coverage to tighter model control or collaborative transcript editing, our round-up of tools offers more flexibility for your needs. 🌈
Best AssemblyAI Alternatives for Speech-to-Text
- Why Go For Assembly AI Alternatives?
- Assembly AI Alternatives at a Glance
- The Best Assembly AI Alternatives to Use
- 1. ClickUp (Best for managing transcription and content workflows)
- 2. Otter.ai (Best for capturing and organizing meeting notes across remote teams)
- 3. Rev (Best for legal and compliance-ready human transcription)
- 4. Google Cloud Speech to Text (Best for real-time voice recognition in multilingual apps)
- 5. Deepgram (Best for developers building custom voice agents or audio analytics features)
- 6. AWS Transcribe (Best for enterprise-grade call transcription and sentiment analysis)
- 7. Descript (Best for creators editing audio/video content through transcripts)
- 8. Whisper (Best for open-source, multilingual transcription projects)
- 9. Speechmatics (Best for structured enterprise transcription with sentiment and topic extraction)
- 10. SpeechBrain (Best for researchers building custom speech models and experimentation pipelines)
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhy Go For Assembly AI Alternatives?
Designed with developers, product teams, and researchers in mind, AssemblyAI helps you move fast from testing in a no-code playground to deploying production-ready models that handle real-time or recorded audio with high accuracy.
But here are some limitations that might push you to consider Assembly AI alternatives:
- Real-time performance limitations: If your product relies on live transcription, you might find that AssemblyAI’s real-time accuracy and response times can vary
- No on-prem or private cloud support: AssemblyAI only runs in the cloud. If you’re working in a regulated industry or need full control over your data environment, the lack of on-premise or private deployment options might not meet your compliance needs
- Limited multilingual coverage: While AssemblyAI supports multiple languages, it’s primarily optimized for English. If your use case involves global users or region-specific dialects, you will need other transcription tools that offer exceptional accuracy in other languages as well
- No option to train custom models: You can’t fine-tune AssemblyAI’s models with your own data. If you work with domain-specific terminology like legal, medical, or technical language, this limitation impacts transcription quality
- No visual transcript editing interface: Being built for developers, it doesn’t offer a built-in UI for reviewing or editing transcripts. If you need to collaborate on transcripts or clean up content before publishing, you’ll need to build your own interface or use other AssemblyAI alternatives
👀 Did You Know? In 2016, millions of viewers tuned into the Olympics—and for the first time, AI was quietly working behind the scenes. IBM Watson powered real-time closed captioning for live broadcasts, marking one of the earliest large-scale uses of AI transcription tools.
Summarize this article for me pleaseAssembly AI Alternatives at a Glance
Let’s take a quick look at the top Assembly AI Alternatives:
| Tool name | Key features | Best for | Pricing |
| ClickUp | Everything app for work, which offers transcription across voice notes, video clips, meetings, and more | Enterprises, mid-sized companies, small Businesses | Free plan available, Paid plans start at $7/user/month |
| Otter.ai | Real-time transcription, speaker separation, live summary, tagging, export formats | Small businesses, mid-sized companies | Free plan available, Paid plans start at $16.99/user/month |
| Rev | Human and AI transcription, legal formatting, timestamps, and certified transcripts | Enterprises, legal teams, small businesses | No free plan, AI: $0.25/min, Human: $1.99/min |
| Google Cloud Speech-to-Text | Real-time streaming, 125+ languages, pre-trained/custom models, strong ecosystem integration | Enterprises, mid-sized companies | Custom pricing |
| Deepgram | Real-time & batch transcription, sentiment analysis, redaction, speaker diarization, on-prem deploy | Enterprises, mid-sized companies | Free trial ($200 credit), Paid plans start at $4,000/year |
| AWS Transcribe | Live transcription, channel identification, custom vocab, contact lens analytics | Enterprises, mid-sized companies | No free plan, Custom pricing |
| Descript | Transcription-based video editing, Overdub, multitrack audio editor, screen recording | Developers, researchers, and small businesses | Free plan available, Paid plans start at $24/month |
| Whisper | Multilingual transcription, translation, punctuation, open-source, confidence scoring | Everything app for work offers transcription across voice notes, video clips, meetings, and more | Free plan available, API: $0.006/minute |
| Speechmatics | Sentiment analysis, topic detection, profanity filtering, audio segmentation | Enterprises, mid-sized companies | Free plan available, Paid plans start at $0.24/hour |
| SpeechBrain | Open-source, modular architecture, pretrained models, Hugging Face integration, speech tasks | Researchers, developers, and academic institutions | Free Forever |
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Best Assembly AI Alternatives to Use
It’s time to get into it! Let’s look at each tool’s capabilities in detail and find the perfect fit for you:
1. ClickUp (Best for managing transcription and content workflows)
Imagine a workspace where every meeting, voice note, and screen recording is automatically transcribed, searchable, and ready to turn into actionable insights. That’s the magic of ClickUp as a transcription software.
With ClickUp’s AI-powered tools, you can capture every word from your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls using the AI Notetaker. Instantly, you’ll have a full transcript, a concise summary, and a checklist of action items—no more scrambling for notes or missing key details. The AI notetaking tool identifies speakers, captures important moments, and highlights key decisions and action items—all while the meeting is in progress.
Once the meeting is transcribed, the content lives in ClickUp Docs, a powerful real-time document editor built for teams. Docs lets you edit collaboratively, leave inline comments, mention teammates, and embed media or tasks—all in one place. It provides a dynamic workspace where you can turn ideas and documentation into action.
You can also track version history, share permissions, and embed ClickUp elements like task lists or project views directly inside the transcript. You can track updates, link related initiatives, or manage sign-offs without leaving the doc.
With ClickUp Brain, you can extract knowledge from any meeting note instantly. Ask natural language questions like “What deadlines were discussed?” or “What’s the next step for the design team?” and get precise, context-aware answers based on your meeting content. This AI for meeting notes can also help you generate summaries tailored to specific use cases like client follow-ups, executive briefs, or stakeholder updates.
But ClickUp doesn’t stop at meetings. Record screen demos via ClickUp Clips or quick voice clips, and ClickUp AI will transcribe them automatically. Need to revisit a specific moment? Just search the transcript or click a timestamp to jump right in. You can even ask ClickUp Brain questions about your recordings, and it’ll pull answers straight from your transcripts.
Whether you’re collaborating across languages, documenting client calls, or keeping track of project updates, ClickUp transforms spoken words into organized, actionable knowledge. It’s more than just transcription—it’s productivity, clarity, and collaboration, all in one place.
Finally, when you feed all these notes and information into ClickUp Tasks, it turns discussion into deliverables. You can highlight a sentence in the transcript and instantly convert it into a task, assign it, and set a due date. That task stays linked to the source conversation for full context, and workflows would keep going without interruptions.
ClickUp best features
- Set up workflow automations: Trigger actions like assigning tasks, updating statuses, or sending notifications the moment a transcript is added or updated to keep your process hands-free and fast
- Standardize with templates: Apply different ClickUp Templates for meeting recaps, content briefs, or editorial workflows to ensure consistency in how transcripts are reviewed and turned into deliverables
- Search across all content: Instantly locate decisions, quotes, or action items from transcripts using ClickUp’s Connected Search
- Track time on transcription tasks: Measure how long it takes to review transcripts, create content, or complete follow-ups for time audits or billing using ClickUp Time Tracking
ClickUp limitations
- With so many capabilities packed in, the platform may feel complex to navigate initially
ClickUp pricing
free forever
Best for personal use
Free Free
Key Features:
60MB Storage
Unlimited Tasks
Unlimited Free Plan Members
unlimited
Best for small teams
$7 $10
Everything in Free Forever plus:
2GB Storage per user
Unlimited Folders and Spaces
Unlimited Integrations
business
Best for mid-sized teams
$12 $19
Everything in Unlimited, plus:
Google SSO
Unlimited Storage
Unlimited Teams
enterprise
Best for many large teams
Get a custom demo and see how ClickUp aligns with your goals.
Everything in Business, plus:
White Labeling
Conditional Logic in Forms
Team Sharing for Spaces
* Prices when billed annually
The world's most complete work AI, starting at $9 per month
ClickUp Brain is a no Brainer. One AI to manage your work, at a fraction of the cost.
ClickUp ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (9,000+ reviews
- Capterra: 4.6/5 (4,000+ reviews)
What are real-life users saying about ClickUp?
A Capterra review says:
2. Otter.ai (Best for capturing and organizing meeting notes across remote teams)
If you’re part of a remote team or managing multiple projects, Otter helps you capture everything discussed in your meetings without needing to type notes. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to automatically record and transcribe conversations in real time.
You also get a live summary that updates as people speak—useful when you need a quick snapshot of what’s been covered so far. Otter also separates speakers so you can track decisions, action items, or follow-ups tied to specific teammates.
You can add highlights or comments and tag teammates in the transcript to flag important parts or clarify next steps. Need to revisit a conversation? Otter’s search feature helps you jump straight to the moment you’re looking for
Otter.ai best features
- Monitor transcript activity, usage trends, and team performance to better understand how your team is using Otter and where productivity can improve
- Download your notes as TXT, PDF, DOCX, or SRT files to support documentation, editing, or video captioning workflows
- Group transcripts by client, project, or internal team to keep your workspace structured and make retrieval easier
Otter.ai limitations
- It lacks more advanced audio intelligence features such as sentiment analysis or PII redaction, which are available in some AssemblyAI alternatives
Otter.ai pricing
- Basic: Free
- Pro: $16.99/user
- Business: $30/user
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Otter.ai ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.3/5 (290+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.3/5 (90+ reviews)
What are real-life users saying about Otter.ai?
A G2 review says:
📚 Also Read: Best Otter.ai Alternatives & Competitors
3. Rev (Best for legal and compliance-ready human transcription)
Rev is a high-accuracy speech-to-text software for legal work, such as depositions, hearings, and client interviews. The platform offers the option to choose between verbatim transcripts that capture every word or clean-read versions that skip filler.
Each transcript includes speaker labels and timestamps, and certified copies if you need them for official filings. You can also request custom formatting like numbered lines or layouts tailored to your court’s requirements.
Your files are encrypted, and every transcriptionist handling legal content signs an NDA to ensure security. If you’re working on a tight timeline, rush delivery is available in as little as 12 hours. To simply cross-departmental collaboration, Rev allows you to add, share, and collaborate on notes with other teams.
Rev best features
- Work with audio or video files like MP3, MP4, or WAV, even if the audio content is poor or has several people talking
- Add always-visible captions directly into your video, including social media and sites that don’t support separate subtitle files
- Click on any word in the transcript to jump to that moment in the video in a few seconds
Rev limitations
- Rev enforces a strict limit of 60 characters per caption group. This constraint can pose challenges when dealing with fast-paced dialogue or complex sentences. It affects the readability and flow of captions
Rev pricing
- Basic: $14.99 per user/month
- Pro: $34.99 per user/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
- Or pay by the minute
- Human Transcription: $1.99 /minute
- AI Transcription: $0.25 /minute
Rev ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.7/5 (420+ reviews)
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
What are real-life users saying about Rev?
A G2 review says:
🎧 Quick Hack: When adding a voice-over to a video, you can record your voice-over as you screen record using ClickUp Clips. There is no need for separate audio syncing later. Just trim and share.
📮 ClickUp Insight: Nearly 88% of our survey respondents now rely on AI tools to simplify and accelerate personal tasks.
Looking to generate those same benefits at work? ClickUp is here to help! ClickUp Brain, ClickUp’s built-in AI assistant, can help you improve productivity by 30% with fewer meetings, quick AI-generated summaries, and automated tasks.
4. Google Cloud Speech to Text (Best for real-time voice recognition in multilingual apps)
If you’re building a voice-enabled app, chatbot, or virtual assistant, Google Cloud Speech to Text gives you the tools to add fast, accurate transcription. It supports real-time streaming, so users can speak naturally and get instant responses—even in low-latency environments.
The Chirp model, trained on millions of hours of audio, handles accents, noisy backgrounds, and fast, conversational speech. With support for over 125 languages, you can build for a global audience without needing separate models.
You can integrate the API using REST or gRPC. This AssemblyAI alternative works well with other tools in the Google Cloud ecosystem, including Dialogflow and Vertex AI. You can manage all parts of the transcription service centrally, from speech input to intent recognition and response generation.
Google Cloud Speech to Text best features
- Select models tailored for voice commands, phone calls, or video transcription, and customize them using the Speech-to-Text UI
- Use customer-managed encryption keys to secure all resources and batch transcriptions
- Transcribe speech accurately even in loud or unpredictable settings, without needing external noise reduction tools
Google Cloud Speech to Text limitations
- Unlike platforms that allow in-browser editing and review, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text doesn’t offer a built-in text editor for collaborative transcript cleanup
Google Cloud Speech to Text pricing
- Custom pricing
Google Cloud Speech to Text ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.6/5 (250+ reviews)
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
What are real-life users saying about the Google Cloud Speech-to-Text tool?
A Capterra review says:
📚 Template Archive: Free Task List Templates in Excel & ClickUp
🧠 Fun Fact: Today’s audio transcription tools don’t just capture words—they identify speakers, detect emotions, and follow the exact sequence of conversation. With ongoing development and smarter algorithms (often built using languages like R), the future promises even sharper accuracy, where machines won’t just hear us, they’ll truly understand us.
5. Deepgram (Best for developers building custom voice agents or audio analytics features)
Deepgram is an API-based tool that converts audio into text, speech, or synthetic voice using deep learning.
Unlike traditional speech recognition systems, it’s trained end-to-end on real-world audio across 30+ languages. You can use it to stream audio live with sub-second latency or transcribe recordings in bulk.
Developers can also leverage it to fine-tune results by boosting keywords, adding domain-specific terms, or labeling speakers. Deepgram also detects sentiment and topics, making it useful not just for transcription but for analyzing what’s being said—and how.
Deepgram best features
- Detect and remove over 50 types of private data like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and Payment Card Industry (PCI) data to stay compliant with privacy regulations
- Host Deepgram on-premises or in a private cloud to keep full control over your data and meet strict security standards
- Identify and pull out names, dates, locations, and other useful details to turn unstructured audio into actionable data
Deepgram limitations
- Deepgram may misidentify silence in noisy environments, causing transcript segmentation errors
Deepgram pricing
- Free: $200 of credit. Then pay-as-you-go
- Growth: $4k+/year
- Enterprise: $15k+/year
- Voice agent API: Custom pricing
- Text to speech: Custom pricing
- Audio intelligence: Custom pricing
Deepgram ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.6/5 (260+ reviews)
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
What are real-life users saying about Deepgram?
A G2 review says:
6. AWS Transcribe (Best for enterprise-grade call transcription and sentiment analysis)
Amazon Transcribe can be used on its own or integrated directly into your support tools. It brings speech-to-text into your workflow without disrupting it.
Handling a high volume of calls? Features like speaker diarization and channel identification make it easy to tell agents and customers apart. You can track performance, review conversations, or troubleshoot faster.
Need more accuracy? Train custom language models to pick up on brand terms, product names, or local accents. For live interactions, streaming transcription gives you instant visibility. Partial results appear in real time, making it suitable for live coaching, escalation, or triggering automated actions.
And with support for over 100 languages, your team stays responsive no matter where your customers are.
AWS Transcribe best features
- Detect and remove specific terms from transcripts automatically to support moderation, compliance, or brand safety needs
- Generate transcripts with precise timing and confidence data for every word
- Connect with AWS Contact Lens to analyze sentiment, detect compliance risks, and uncover issues across customer conversations
AWS Transcribe limitations
- Amazon Transcribe struggles with noisy, low-quality, or media-rich audio, making it less ideal for podcasts or overlapping conversations
AWS Transcribe pricing
- Custom pricing
AWS Transcribe ratings and reviews
- G2: Not enough reviews
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
What are real-life users saying about AWS Transcribe?
A Capterra review says:
7. Descript (Best for creators editing audio/video content through transcripts)
Descript is an all-in-one audio and video editing tool that transcribes spoken content into text. It allows you to edit media as easily as a document.
You can highlight insights on the spot, making tracking feature requests or pain points easier. The transcript appears like a document, so copying key moments into your roadmap or backlog is simple.
However, if you want to build transcription into your product, note that Descript doesn’t currently offer a public speech-to-text API. Its transcription features are limited to the desktop and web apps. While there’s an Overdub API for synthetic voice generation, it’s only available to enterprise users and doesn’t support general transcription use cases.
Descript best features
- Generate a synthetic version of your voice to fix mistakes or add new lines
- Work on projects with teammates simultaneously, using shared editing access, live comments, and version tracking to streamline feedback
- Export your video in multiple formats or post directly to platforms like YouTube
Descript limitations
- The Overdub feature may not always produce perfect results for non-native speakers or if the voice model isn’t trained with sufficient data.
Descript pricing
- Free
- Hobbyist: $24 per person/month
- Creator: $35 per person/month
- Business: $65 per person/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Descript ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.6/5 (770+ reviews)
- Capterra: 4.8/5 (170+ reviews)
What are real-life users saying about Descript?
A G2 review says:
8. Whisper (Best for open-source, multilingual transcription projects)
If you’re a researcher or developer working with multilingual audio, Whisper AI gives you a flexible and accurate way to transcribe, translate, and analyze speech. Trained on 680,000 hours of diverse audio, it handles real-world conditions like background noise, code-switching, and varied accents without needing you to clean the data first.
You can use it to detect spoken language, generate phrase-level timestamps, or convert speech to English from nearly 100 languages. With five model sizes from 39 million to 1.55 billion parameters, you can choose what best fits your compute budget.
Because it’s open-source under the MIT license, you can modify, fine-tune, or integrate it into your own tools and research workflows.
Whisper best features
- Format transcripts automatically by inserting commas, periods, and proper casing to make the text easier to read and publish
- Maintain accuracy in long recordings by feeding previous transcript segments into the model
- Display a confidence score (0 to 1) for the detected language and flag uncertain sections for review or correction
Whisper limitations
- Transcription may be slow when working with long audio files, if you’re using beam search decoding or one of the larger Whisper models
Whisper pricing
- Free
- Whisper API: $0.006 per minute of audio processed
Whisper ratings and reviews
- G2: Not enough reviews
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
What are real-life users saying about Whisper?
A G2 review says:
📚 Template Archive: Free Meeting Notes Templates to Take Better Meeting Minutes
9. Speechmatics (Best for structured enterprise transcription with sentiment and topic extraction)
Speechmatics gives you enterprise-grade APIs for Speech-to-Text and voice AI agents. It is built to handle a wide range of languages, accents, and audio conditions. It supports all major audio and video file formats with automatic sample rate detection, allowing you to work with raw media without extra prep.
With numeral formatting, Speechmatics automatically turns spoken numbers, dates, and currencies into clean, structured text, saving you the effort of manual corrections later.
Profanity and disfluency detection helps you flag or remove filler words and offensive language, which is useful for customer calls, media content, or legal transcripts.
Speechmatics best features
- Analyze how customers feel during calls by detecting emotional tone, and go beyond star ratings and surface deeper insights
- Break down long audio or video into specific topics with time markers
- Divide content into summarized sections, each with its own title, to navigate and revisit key points
Speechmatics limitations
- Since it does not natively integrate with as many third-party tools or enterprise platforms as some other transcription APIs, this may increase setup time
Speechmatics pricing
- Free
- Pro: from $0.24/hr
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Speechmatics ratings and reviews
- G2: Not enough reviews
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
What are real-life users saying about Speechmatics?
A G2 review says:
10. SpeechBrain (Best for researchers building custom speech models and experimentation pipelines)
SpeechBrain is an open-source, all-in-one conversational AI toolkit designed to support research and learning in speech and language processing. Built on PyTorch, it is a resource for academic teams and students who want hands-on access to the building blocks of modern speech technologies.
The toolkit includes over 100 pretrained models and 200+ training recipes. You can train your models, fine-tune existing ones, or use reproducible baselines for coursework and research papers. All without needing to build everything from scratch.
It supports self-supervised learning, works with multiple microphones, and has detailed documentation. This makes it easier to handle real-world challenges like low-resource ASR, speaker diarization in noisy settings, and emotion detection across multi-speaker audio.
SpeechBrain best features
- Choose from RNNs, CNNs, Transformers, and conformer models depending on your research direction or performance goals
- Build, train, and evaluate models using a modular pipeline to swap out components (e.g., encoders, decoders, loss functions) for experimentation and learning
- Go beyond speech recognition with built-in support for speaker verification, emotion recognition, speech separation, speech enhancement, and language identification
SpeechBrain limitations
- Users without a strong background in deep learning or PyTorch may struggle to get started
SpeechBrain pricing
- Free Forever
SpeechBrain ratings and reviews
- G2: Not enough reviews
- Capterra: Not enough reviews
Summarize this article for me pleaseConvert Meeting Conversations into Clear Next Steps
AssemblyAI and its best alternatives stop at transcription. You still have to dig through raw text, extract key takeaways, and assign action items. It’s a disjointed workflow that slows momentum and leaves insights stranded.
That’s where ClickUp stands apart. Rather than just transcripts, it offers a complete transcription service. With it, you get to instantly record and transcribe meetings, voice notes, and screen clips with ClickUp AI. Summaries and transcripts are auto-organized in Docs, linked to tasks, and searchable with ClickUp Brain. Capture, share, and act on every conversation—all in one place.
✅ Try ClickUp for free today!
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
