The best speech-to-text models in 2026
The best speech-to-text models right now are ElevenLabs Scribe v2, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe and Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, out of 7 we have reviewed. Each is ranked by our rating, with its price, our verdict and who it suits.
Updated Oct 23, 2026 · Ranked from our reviews · How we review
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Scribe v2 transcribes accurately and does the redaction and speaker work for you, but Microsoft now sells better accuracy for less than half the price.
Best for: Meeting, media and clinical products that need speaker labels and redaction as well as an accurate transcript.
Price: API: Scribe v2 and v2 Medical $0.22 per hour of audio; Scribe v2 Realtime $0.39 per hour; keyterm prompting adds $0.05 per hour. Plans from $6/month include hours.
Read our ElevenLabs Scribe v2 review4.4/5 - 2
Accurate and cheap enough for most transcription, yet no longer the obvious buy on either measure.
Best for: Teams already on the Gemini API who want file and streaming transcription from one vendor at about half a cent a minute.
Price: Transcribe about $0.005 per minute ($2 input / $12 output per 1M tokens); Transcribe Live about $0.009 per minute ($3.50 / $21). Free tier in AI Studio and the API.
Read our Gemini 3.5 Transcribe review4.2/5 - 3
Parakeet v3 is the speed record in transcription, with Whisper-class accuracy and a hard border around Europe.
Best for: Developers transcribing large volumes of European-language audio who prize speed and low cost.
Price: Free under CC BY 4.0. Together AI's hosted version costs $0.0015 a minute ($1.50 per 1,000 minutes).
Read our Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 review4.1/5 - 4
Nova-3 is quick and cheap enough for live call audio, but on a neutral test it makes more than twice the errors of the accuracy leaders.
Best for: Contact-centre and live-captioning teams that need fast, high-concurrency transcription of phone audio, including on their own servers.
Price: Pre-recorded $0.0043/min (monolingual) or $0.0052/min (multilingual) pay-as-you-go; streaming $0.0048/min on promotion, $0.0077 regular. Growth plan from $4,000/year is cheaper. $200 free credit.
Read our Deepgram Nova-3 review4.0/5 - 5
A sensible upgrade for OpenAI shops, though the deprecation it rides on takes away speaker labels and timestamps that this model does not give back.
Best for: Teams on the OpenAI API who must leave Whisper or GPT-4o Transcribe before February 2027 and do not need speaker labels or timestamps.
Price: $0.0045 per minute of audio ($4.50 per 1,000 minutes); no Batch support. Streaming gpt-live-transcribe is $0.017 per minute.
Read our GPT Transcribe review3.9/5 - 6
VibeVoice-ASR turns an hour-long meeting into a speaker-labelled transcript in one pass, and every accuracy figure for it is still Microsoft's own.
Best for: Teams transcribing long, multi-speaker recordings on their own hardware who want speaker labels without a separate diarisation step.
Price: Free under the MIT licence. Also available in Azure AI Foundry Labs.
Read our VibeVoice-ASR review3.8/5 - 7
Whisper turbo is now the cheap, unrestricted baseline that newer speech models are measured against, not the model that wins.
Best for: Teams that need cheap, permissively licensed transcription they can self-host or buy for cents an hour, and can live with second-tier accuracy.
Price: Free under the MIT licence. Hosted versions are cheap: Artificial Analysis lists Groq at about $0.67 per 1,000 minutes.
Read our Whisper large-v3-turbo review3.7/5