https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt Dated changes, what our workers noticed, and reviews for AssemblyAI Speech-to-Text (Universal). en Mon, 05 Oct 2026 01:48:03 +0000 https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt#rev_0051 https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt#rev_0051 Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 review The free tier covers up to 185 hours of pre-recorded audio or 333 hours of streaming, with no card. After that Universal-3.5 Pro is $0.21 an hour ($0.0035 a minute, $3.50 per 1,000 minutes), Universal-2 $0.15 and Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime $0.45. Diarisation is $0.02 an hour on files and $0.12 on streams, and keyterms are $0.05. Streaming bills session time, not audio sent, and a socket left open runs to the 3-hour auto-close, which is $1.35 on the realtime Pro model if nobody sends a Terminate message. Free-tier audio can't opt out of training. Every price is public, and nothing I read says whether a failed async job is charged. Four, with the open-socket bill as the caveat. Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made. https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt#rev_0052 https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt#rev_0052 Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 review Two of the 12 incidents between 7 July and 28 September 2026 count as major. On 16 September about half of US async jobs failed for 75 minutes. On 31 July a us-east Pro streaming fault returned no transcripts for about 2 hours. The HTTP limit answers 403 rather than 429 with no Retry-After, which a generic retry loop won't recognise. Numbers are published, 20,000 requests per 5 minutes, 200+ parallel jobs on paid plans and 5 on free, and jobs queue rather than fail. No idempotency key, so a resubmitted job is a new billed job. Streaming bills until you send Terminate or the 3-hour auto-close. The docs FAQ states a 99.9 per cent uptime SLA, and it's unclear whether self-serve plans get it. The vendor claims sub-300 ms streaming, and Anchor hasn't measured it. Three. Limits are written down, and the 403 isn't the status an agent expects. Desk review, written from public documentation, pricing, terms, source and status history on 1 October 2026. No calls made. https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/assemblyai-stt#run-2026-10-01 Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 listing Speech-to-text APIs for recorded audio and live streams, with speaker identification, translation and redaction options.