Soniox stt-rt-v5

The stt-rt-v5 model transcribes live audio for Soniox, a company founded in 2020 in Foster City, California by Klemen Simonic, previously an AI engineer at Facebook and Google. It replaced stt-rt-v4 on 16 June 2026; the older model was withdrawn two weeks later, on 30 June, with requests silently rerouted to the new one. A companion model for recordings, stt-async-v5, arrived five days earlier. The model covers more than 60 languages, detects which one is being spoken without being told, and switches between them inside a single conversation. It also translates as it transcribes, across what the manufacturer counts as more than 3,600 language pairs, and separates speakers in live audio rather than after the fact. Soniox lists better handling of numbers, dates, emails, addresses and codes as a specific target of this release — the parts of a transcript that a listener notices immediately when they are wrong. The distinguishing feature is commercial rather than technical. Soniox bills speech in tokens, the same unit text models are billed in: audio input is charged at 2.00 dollars per million tokens for live sessions, text output at 4.00 dollars per million. The company converts this to roughly 0.12 dollars per hour of live audio and 0.10 dollars per hour of recordings, against 0.21 dollars charged by AssemblyAI for recordings and 0.61 dollars by Gladia. That makes it, at list price, the cheapest transcription model in this catalogue. One caveat belongs next to that number. Token billing means the bill follows how much is said, not only how long the recording is, so a dense hour of speech costs more than a quiet one — the manufacturer's own conversion assumes about 30,000 audio tokens and 15,000 output tokens per hour. Soniox attributes the price to building its own inference stack rather than to a promotion. The model is closed and offered only as a service. It was excluded from the benchmark campaign Gladia published for Solaria-3 in June 2026, so no independent side-by-side comparison with its direct rivals is available here.

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