Gladia
Speech-to-text API with real-time transcription, diarisation and translation.
why this verdict
Keep it for the workflow, not the AI
Whisper covers the headline feature free, and the workflow around it is why you would still open this.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Whisper and cheap hosted transcription driving speech-to-text pricing toward zero. OpenAI, October 1, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers headline only editorial call
- The headline feature, but not the workflow, data or integrations around it.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 1 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Whisper.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- October 1, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
Gladia packages open speech models into a production API with speaker diarisation, translation and real-time streaming, aimed at European companies wanting GDPR-compliant processing. It is competent and well positioned regionally. The category difficulty is unavoidable: the underlying model is free, several well-funded competitors sell the same wrapper, and transcription has become a feature customers expect bundled rather than a product they seek out and buy.
Escape hatches
Broader audio intelligence features
assemblyai.com open_in_newLower latency for realtime voice agents
deepgram.com open_in_newSelf-host and pay only for compute
github.com open_in_new1 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.