# Best free AssemblyAI alternatives

9 free alternatives to AssemblyAI and 0 more. AssemblyAI is free tier + paid.

## Alternatives

- [ElevenLabs Scribe](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/elevenlabs-scribe) — Freemium — Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/nvidia-parakeet) — Free — Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params
- [sherpa-onnx](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/sherpa-onnx) — Free — Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech, VAD and speaker diarization without internet
- [NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/nvidia-canary-qwen-2-5b) — Free — Speech-recognition plus LLM hybrid model that transcribes and can summarize or answer questions about audio
- [Deepgram](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/deepgram) — Freemium — Fast, accurate speech-to-text API
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/mistral-voxtral) — Freemium — Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face
- [Speechmatics](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/speechmatics) — Freemium — Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support
- [Soniox](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/soniox) — Freemium — Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates
- [OpenAI Whisper](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/openai-whisper) — Free — Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free

## FAQ

### What is the best free alternative to AssemblyAI?

ElevenLabs Scribe is the closest free alternative to AssemblyAI: same Speech & Transcription Engines sub-category, and it is free tier + paid. Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency

### Are there free AssemblyAI alternatives?

Yes — 9 of the 9 alternatives listed here are free or freemium: ElevenLabs Scribe, NVIDIA Parakeet, sherpa-onnx, NVIDIA Canary-Qwen 2.5B, Deepgram. None of them are paid-only.

### Is AssemblyAI free?

AssemblyAI is free tier + paid. There is a free tier you can work in, with paid plans above it.

### How were these AssemblyAI alternatives chosen?

They are the other tools in Speech & Transcription Engines, then the rest of AI Models & Local Execution, ordered free tiers first and capped at 9. There is no sponsorship and no paid placement in that ordering — only the pricing tier decides.

## Related

- [AssemblyAI](https://aitools.flocci.in/tool/assemblyai)
- [Speech & Transcription Engines](https://aitools.flocci.in/category/ai-models-local-execution/speech-transcription-engines)
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Source: Flocci AI Tools — https://aitools.flocci.in/alternatives/assemblyai

Facts last verified: October 2026