New AssemblyAI-TTS-1: Text-to-speech for voice agents. Learn more
Real-time speech-to-text

Turn audio into text in real time

Stream audio over a WebSocket and get formatted, immutable transcripts back at ~150 ms p50 from the Realtime Speech-to-Text API—accurate enough for production voice agents. Open a connection and start transcribing in a few lines of Python or JavaScript.

~150 ms p50 latency

Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime returns partial and final transcripts at ~150 ms p50—formatted, immutable, and fast enough to drive live voice agents and agent assist.

Built for live conversation

Native turn detection, speaker labels, and keyterm prompting handle the hard parts of streaming audio out of the box.

Real-time multilingual

Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime streams 32 languages with automatic language detection and code-switching. Universal Streaming Multilingual covers English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese at $0.15/hr.

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

Open a stream minutes after you sign up

Grab your API key and connect to the streaming WebSocket with the Python or JavaScript SDK—no infrastructure to stand up. Handle partial and finalized turns with a single event handler and start building. Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime is $0.45/hr and Universal Streaming is $0.15/hr, billed on session duration.

Start building free

No credit card required

Streaming word error rate

Streaming word error rate measures realtime Speech-to-Text accuracy against a human reference—the core signal for anything that acts on live audio.

Normalized WER on the voice-agent caller corpus, mean of three noise conditions.

*Lower is better*
Voice-agent word error rate, realtime
AssemblyAI Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime
5.19%
Soniox Realtime
6.83%
ElevenLabs Scribe v2 Realtime
7.78%
Speechmatics Enhanced Realtime
8.14%
Google Gemini 3.5 Transcribe Live
8.48%
AWS Transcribe Streaming
8.58%
Deepgram Nova-3
8.64%

Source: AssemblyAI realtime benchmarks technical report v2026.09 (assemblyai.com/benchmarks), data 18 Aug–24 Sep 2026.