AssemblyAI
Shares rank 23 of 25 speech recognition models by recommenders
People recommend it for accurate transcription, good cost-performance and clear data terms. One critic reports rival services beating it on streaming benchmarks.
People recommend it for accurate transcription, good cost-performance and clear data terms. One critic reports rival services beating it on streaming benchmarks.
6 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 83%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
More accurate than Whisper and ElevenLabs
“Assembly AI's transcription models are significant better than Whisper and even ElevenLabs”
Comment from 7 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: Whisper transcribes 70-year-olds more accurately than 20-year-olds” Strong cost-to-performance ratio
“unbeatable here in terms of cost/performance”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3” Credits last for years
“I've been uploading the audio to AssemblyAI, I somehow still haven't used up my credits after several years lol”
Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]” Solid retention and no-training terms
“they have solid terms, 24hr retention and no training”
Comment from 14 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Others beat it on streaming benchmark
“much better than assembly and elevenlabs in basically all cases on our internal streaming benchmarking”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “Voxtral Transcribe 2”
Other speech recognition models people recommend
The four most recommended other speech recognition models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper | 164 | 53 | 76% | 12 | — | Approved |
| NVIDIA Parakeet | 144 | 27 | 84% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Mistral Voxtral | 69 | 27 | 72% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Moonshine open-weights STT models | 37 | 13 | 74% | 7 | — | Approved |
| AssemblyAIThis page | 5 | 1 | 83% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
5 of the 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“they have solid terms, 24hr retention and no training”
“I've been uploading the audio to AssemblyAI, I somehow still haven't used up my credits after several years lol”
“Assembly AI's transcription models are significant better than Whisper and even ElevenLabs”
“unbeatable here in terms of cost/performance”
“much better than assembly and elevenlabs in basically all cases on our internal streaming benchmarking”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.