OpenAI Whisper
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free
- 99+ languages and translation
- Robust to accents and noise
- Powers countless apps
AI Models & Local Execution (9)
All 9 speech and transcription engines in the Flocci catalog, 9 of them free or freemium. Pricing tier and real capabilities on every entry — no ads, no sponsored placement.
AllLocal LLM RunnersModel Hosting & Inference APIsNotable Open ModelsSpeech & Transcription EnginesFine-Tuning & Training FrameworksLLM Eval & ObservabilityLeaderboards & BenchmarksRobotics & Embodied AI
free
Deepgram
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Fast, accurate speech-to-text API
- Real-time streaming and diarization
- Voice-agent building blocks
- Free credits to start
AssemblyAI
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Speech-to-text with audio intelligence
- Summaries, topics and sentiment
- Speaker diarization
- Free tier for developers
NVIDIA Parakeet
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params
- CC-BY-4.0 license, free for commercial and non-commercial use
- RTFx ~3,386 — extremely fast inference relative to accuracy
Mistral Voxtral
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face
- Built-in Q&A/summarization over audio, not just raw transcription
- Function-calling directly from voice input for agent workflows
Speechmatics
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support
- Model-training discount program cuts costs 33% for data-sharing customers
- On-premises/VPC deployment for privacy-sensitive enterprise use
Soniox
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates
- Combines transcription + translation in one streaming API call
- Diarization and speech translation bundled at no extra cost
ElevenLabs Scribe
Speech & Transcription Engines
- Scribe v2 Realtime transcribes in under 150ms latency
- Dynamic audio-event tagging (laughter, footsteps) beyond plain words
- Keyterm prompting locks in up to 1,000 specified terms for accuracy
WhisperX
Speech & Transcription Engines
- 70x real-time transcription speed via batched inference on top of Whisper
- Adds wav2vec2 forced alignment for accurate word-level timestamps Whisper lacks natively
- Built-in speaker diarization and VAD preprocessing to cut hallucinations
Speech & Transcription Engines — straight answers
What are the best free speech and transcription engines?
Flocci AI Tools lists 9 speech and transcription engines, ordered free tiers first: NVIDIA Parakeet, OpenAI Whisper, WhisperX, AssemblyAI and Deepgram. All of them are free or have a free tier. Every entry states what it uniquely does, not a score.
Are there completely free speech and transcription engines?
Yes — 3 of these are marked fully free with no paid plan attached: NVIDIA Parakeet, OpenAI Whisper and WhisperX. The rest are freemium, trial or paid, and each row states which.
What should I look for in speech and transcription engines?
Start with what you need to do: turn audio into accurate text, often offline. Then check the pricing tier, because "free" here means no paid plan at all while "freemium" means a free tier under paid plans. Every tool on this page lists both.
See the full list →Looking for a ranked shortlist instead? See the best free speech and transcription engines.