# AssemblyAI

5 Hacker News commenters recommended AssemblyAI and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for accurate transcription, good cost-performance and clear data terms. One critic reports rival services beating it on streaming benchmarks.

## Why people recommend it

- More accurate than Whisper and ElevenLabs (1 comments): "Assembly AI's transcription models are significant better than Whisper and even ElevenLabs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204930))
- Strong cost-to-performance ratio (1 comments): "unbeatable here in terms of cost/performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147288))
- Credits last for years (1 comments): "I've been uploading the audio to AssemblyAI, I somehow still haven't used up my credits after several years lol" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499066))
- Solid retention and no-training terms (1 comments): "they have solid terms, 24hr retention and no training" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705436))

## What people warn about

- Others beat it on streaming benchmark (1 comments): "much better than assembly and elevenlabs in basically all cases on our internal streaming benchmarking" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892471))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenAI Whisper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper.md): 164 recommend
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/parakeet.md): 144 recommend
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-transcribe-2.md): 69 recommend
- [Moonshine open-weights STT models](https://hackerapproved.com/p/moonshine.md): 37 recommend
- [whisper.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper-cpp.md): 33 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.assemblyai.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "AssemblyAI", https://hackerapproved.com/p/assemblyai/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).