A 
AssemblyAI
Speech-to-text plus audio intelligence models as one API.
NOT REALLY
why this verdict
Keep it — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the voice & audio job, so this one is still worth keeping open.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Open-weight Whisper models made transcription nearly free. OpenAI, January 1, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 2 of 2 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Deepgram and Whisper.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
Reason composed from the fields above missing: announcement linked recorded: free replacement listed recorded: two or more escape hatches
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- January 1, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
AssemblyAI's answer to free Whisper is everything after the transcript: speaker labels, topic detection, sentiment, PII redaction, summaries. It sells the audio-understanding layer rather than the words, which is where the remaining margin in speech actually is.
Escape hatches
D 
Deepgram Faster streaming.
deepgram.com open_in_new W 
Whisper Free, self-hosted.
openai.com open_in_new2 of 2 replacements have a usable free tier.