New AssemblyAI-TTS-1: Text-to-speech for voice agents. Learn more
Benchmarks and pricing

Pricing without the lock-in

Get started for free, then from $0.15/hr—no commitments, no minimums, no credit card to start. See exactly how AssemblyAI's accuracy and price stack up against the providers on our published benchmarks.

Usage-based pricing

Pay as you go from $0.15/hr with no commitments, no minimums, and no lock-in.

Best accuracy per dollar

Best-in-class word error rate on our published benchmarks, so you never trade accuracy for cost.

Benchmark on your audio

Request a custom benchmark on your own audio across AssemblyAI and other providers, with full methodology. A BAA is available for customers processing PHI.

Metaview
Ashby
Cluely
Genio
Siro

36%

improvement in close rate

See case study
LiveKit
EliseAI
Commure
Dovetail
Fireflies

“The new Universal-3.5 Pro speech model from AssemblyAI is best so far in terms of accuracy, latency, and language switching.”

Retell
CallRail
Apollo.io
ClickUp
Calabrio

80%

increase in customer satisfaction

HeyGen
Granola
Siro
JotPsych
Granola

“Assembly has saved us countless hours managing models, and provided exceptional accuracy.”

Metaview
Ashby
Cluely
Genio
Siro

36%

improvement in close rate

See case study
LiveKit
EliseAI
Commure
Dovetail
Fireflies

“The new Universal-3.5 Pro speech model from AssemblyAI is best so far in terms of accuracy, latency, and language switching.”

Retell
CallRail
Apollo.io
ClickUp
Calabrio

80%

increase in customer satisfaction

HeyGen
Granola
Siro
JotPsych
Granola

“Assembly has saved us countless hours managing models, and provided exceptional accuracy.”

Quickstart

Start free, scale without surprises

Create a free account with credits included—no credit card. Test in the no-code playground, then move to production from $0.15/hr with no minimums or commitments.

Start building free

No credit card required

Word error rate

Low price only matters if the transcript is right. Word error rate is the share of words the model gets wrong against a human reference—the standard measure of Speech-to-Text accuracy.

Average normalized WER across synthetic medical, accented English, general speech and webinar sets.

*Lower is better*
Pre-recorded word error rate
AssemblyAI Universal-3.5 Pro
4.35%
Mistral Voxtral Mini
5.24%
OpenAI GPT-4o Transcribe
5.34%
Deepgram Nova-3
6.66%
Azure Batch
7.02%

Source: AssemblyAI published benchmarks (assemblyai.com/benchmarks), pre-recorded tab, updated July 2026.