The same hour of audio costs 10 cents or 61 — and no benchmark covers all the sellers

Three transcription vendors entered this catalogue today, and putting their price lists side by side produces a number that is hard to explain: an hour of recorded audio costs 10 cents at Soniox and 61 cents at Gladia. Between them sit Speechmatics at 12.9 cents for its newest model and AssemblyAI at 21 cents. Same task, same month, a six-fold spread. Within a single vendor the direction is not consistent either. Speechmatics released Melia 1 on 17 June as its broadest model — it takes no language setting at all and switches between 55-plus languages inside one recording — and priced it at roughly half of Standard, the model most of its customers run, and a third of Enhanced, its most accurate one. AssemblyAI moved the other way: its June flagship costs 21 cents against 15 for the older model it sits above, which also covers far more languages. What is missing is any way for a buyer to check whether the expensive hour is a better hour. Every set of comparative numbers published this summer was produced by one of the sellers, running its rivals' systems itself. Gladia's June campaign for Solaria-3 measured AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Mistral and Speechmatics — and excluded Soniox, the cheapest of them, for lack of data. Speechmatics reports beating Deepgram and Microsoft on 91 percent of FLEURS languages, on its own runs. Soniox publishes no error rate for its current model at all, only a list of things it does better than the model it replaced. One vendor did something the others did not. Gladia printed the benchmarks on which its new model is worse than its old one — 32 percent worse on recordings of parliamentary debate, 36 percent worse on read audiobooks — and told customers with that kind of audio to stay on the older model. It is a narrow admission, and it is still the only published number this month that works against the company that published it. For readers choosing a supplier, the practical consequence is that the price list is the only figure in this market that has been independently fixed. Everything about accuracy is currently a claim made by an interested party, on test audio of its own choosing.