Gladia
Real-time & batch transcription API with built-in audio intelligence for multilingual voice apps
If you need true multilingual real-time transcription with intelligence features bundled in, Gladia is a strong pick. Deepgram may edge ahead on raw English benchmarks, but Gladia's 100+ language coverage and included features give it cost advantages. The switch to credit-based billing is notable—you'll manage a prepaid wallet, so keep an eye on top-ups. Overall, a solid choice for teams that value language diversity and EU data residency.
Verified 4d ago · liveness 79/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/gladia
- Developers building multilingual voice agents needing sub-300ms latency
- Contact centers requiring real-time transcription with QA and compliance
- Meeting assistant providers needing diarized transcripts with summarization
- Media teams automating subtitles across 100+ languages
- Hobbyists seeking unlimited free transcription (free tier is one-time €50 credit)
- Teams needing on-premise deployment (API-only, no self-hosted)
- Projects focused solely on English with absolute lowest WER (Deepgram may edge out)
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Skip Gladia if you need unlimited free transcription, on-prem deployment, or if English-only accuracy with the absolute lowest WER is your top priority—Deepgram may be a better fit.
The free tier is a one-time €50 credit, not a monthly allowance; once used, you must top up or upgrade to Starter.
Gladia's pricing fits early-stage developers who can start free with €50 credits and pay-as-you-go, then transition to Growth (67% cheaper) once volume justifies a commitment. Compared to Deepgram or AssemblyAI, bundled intelligence features may lower total cost. Enterprise pricing is custom.
In short
Gladia — Real-time & batch transcription API with built-in audio intelligence for multilingual voice apps. Best for Developers building multilingual voice agents needing sub-300ms latency, Contact centers requiring real-time transcription with QA and compliance, Meeting assistant providers needing diarized transcripts with summarization. Free to start; paid plans from $0.2/mo.
What's new in Gladia
Checked 4 days agoAcross the latest 3 updates: 1 launch, 1 pricing change and 1 changelog entry.
GladiaFlow: Open-source voice dictation for your desktop
Released GladiaFlow, an MIT-licensed desktop dictation app for macOS and Windows that uses Gladia's real-time STT API. Press a hotkey and dictate into any app.
Moving to credit-based billing
Transitioned from subscription billing to a prepaid credit wallet. No price change per hour, but you now prepay and can set auto top-up.
SDK release: JavaScript 1.0.7 and Python 1.0.3
New SDKs support connect_session() for keeping API keys off clients and reliable reconnects for long-running streams.
What people actually say about Gladia — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
64 mentions across 4 sources (Hacker News, YouTube, Bluesky, Lemmy) · researched Jul 5, 2026.
- +#1 on STT blind test according to compare-stt.com
- +Sub-300ms real-time streaming with <100ms partials
- +Bundled intelligence features at no extra cost
- +100+ languages with auto-detection and code-switching
- +EU data residency and SOC 2 / HIPAA compliance
- −Hallucinated on tricky audio where competitors stayed silent
- −Solaria-3 initial language coverage is limited to 5 languages
- −Community support is thin outside HN and few Bluesky posts
- −Vendor lock-in concerns for open-source proponents
- −Uncertain pricing impact from OVH acquisition
- • Potential overage charges for high-volume usage not clearly documented
- • AI model enrichment (audio-to-LLM) may incur additional compute costs
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Gladia? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: August 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Real-time streaming transcription (sub-300ms latency)
- Batch/async transcription for pre-recorded audio
- Partial transcripts in under 100ms for live conversations
- Solaria-3 model: 9.6% WER on real English audio
- 100+ languages with automatic detection
- Code-switching between languages
- Speaker diarization (#1 on pyannoteAI benchmark)
- PII redaction
- Sentiment analysis (94% confidence)
- Named entity recognition (names, emails, addresses)
- Chapterization and summarization
- Audio-to-LLM pipeline (native or bring-your-own-model)
- Translation and subtitles generation
- Custom vocabulary and custom spelling
- CLI tool (gladia-cli) for command-line transcription
About Gladia
Gladia is an end-to-end audio infrastructure platform that turns audio and video into text and structured insights through a single API. It's built for developers creating voice agents, contact centers, meeting assistants, and media tools. The platform offers real-time streaming transcription with sub-300ms latency and batch transcription across 100+ languages, featuring automatic language detection and code-switching. The latest Solaria-3 model achieves a 9.6% word error rate on real English audio with strong gains across European languages, and a new partial transcripts feature delivers tokens in under 100ms for smoother real-time interactions. Beyond raw transcription, Gladia bundles audio intelligence directly into the API—speaker diarization, PII redaction, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, chapterization, and summarization—at no extra cost. An audio-to-LLM pipeline lets developers enrich transcripts using native models or bring-your-own models. The platform supports 100% EU data residency, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 compliance, plus a 99.95% uptime SLA. With over 300K developers and 2B+ minutes transcribed, Gladia competes directly with Deepgram and AssemblyAI. What sets it apart is broader multilingual support—100+ languages in both real-time and async—and the inclusion of intelligence features that rivals often charge extra for as add-ons. It also provides a comparison chart highlighting that competitors like Deepgram and AssemblyAI only support 30+ languages in real time, while Gladia leads in code-switching and bundled features. Gladia is designed for teams that need enterprise-grade reliability and data sovereignty without stitching together multiple providers. The free tier gives €50 in credits (about 80+ hours of async transcription) with no credit card required, making it easy to evaluate. For high-volume needs, Growth and Enterprise tiers offer lower unit pricing.
Behind the Verdict
Gladia stands out in a crowded STT market by bundling audio intelligence directly into the API. Speaker diarization, sentiment analysis, entity detection, and translation are included at no extra cost—competitors like Deepgram and AssemblyAI often charge for these as add-ons. For international teams, the 100+ language support in both real-time and async is a clear differentiator, as is the European data residency focus. However, the recent move to credit-based billing (July 2026) changes how you budget. You now prepay for credits rather than pay monthly. While pricing per hour stays the same, teams used to invoice-based billing may need to adjust. The one-time €50 free credit (previously 10 hours/month on free plan) might be a letdown for hobbyists. Gladia is less ideal if you need on-prem deployment or if English-only accuracy is your sole priority. Also, fine-tuning is only available on Enterprise. Overall, for startups and enterprises building voice products that must work across languages, Gladia offers strong value and reliability.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Gladia actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You want to add real-time transcription to your voice agent with low latency.
Outcome: You integrate Gladia's WebSocket API, use partial transcripts for instant feedback, and ship in a day.
You need diarized transcripts and summaries from recorded meetings.
Outcome: Upload recordings to Gladia's async API, get speaker labels and chapterized summaries automatically.
You need real-time transcription for agent assist and compliance.
Outcome: Stream calls to Gladia, use sentiment analysis and PII redaction in real time, and trigger webhooks to CRM.
Use Cases
- Transcribe live customer support calls in real time to enable agent assist and compliance monitoring
- Generate meeting summaries and action items from Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams recordings
- Automatically subtitle multilingual videos for media production and localization
- Redact PII from sensitive call recordings before storage or analysis
- Analyze sentiment and named entities in sales calls to surface key topics and customer sentiment
- Build voice-based AI agents with low-latency transcription for interactive voice response systems
- Dictate emails, Slack messages, or commit messages with GladiaFlow desktop app
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-08-17
Limitations
- Gladia is an API-first platform; there is no on-premise or self-hosted option.
- The free tier is limited to a one-time €50 credit, after which you must top up or upgrade.
- Specific rate limits and concurrency caps are not fully public—only that Starter has 30 real-time and 25 async concurrent requests.
- Fine-tuning is Enterprise-only.
- The switch to credit-based billing means you must monitor your wallet balance.
as of 2026-08-18
Verification history
We have re-verified Gladia 6 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Gladia tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Starter
$0.61/hr async, $0.75/hr real-time, €50 free credits
Ideal for
Solo developers and small teams starting out, processing up to 80+ hours of audio with the €50 free credit, evaluating the API before committing.
What this tier adds
Starting tier: pay-as-you-go at $0.61/hr async and $0.75/hr real-time, includes 30 real-time and 25 async concurrent requests.
Growth
Async from $0.20/hr, Real-time from $0.25/hr (custom)
Ideal for
Growing startups with predictable volume who can commit to lower per-hour pricing—67% less than Starter—and need flexible concurrency.
What this tier adds
Adds custom volume discounts, flexible concurrent requests, and automatic model training opt-out, with 99.9% uptime SLA.
Enterprise
Custom (annual)
Ideal for
Large enterprises requiring custom models, fine-tuning, zero data retention, and dedicated support with annual contracts.
What this tier adds
Adds unlimited concurrent requests, default model training opt-out, zero data retention, custom hosting, and dedicated Slack/account manager.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Gladia's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Gladia's pricing fits early-stage developers who can start free with €50 credits and pay-as-you-go, then transition to Growth (67% cheaper) once volume justifies a commitment. Compared to Deepgram or AssemblyAI, bundled intelligence features may lower total cost. Enterprise pricing is custom.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Gladia — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
For a developer familiar with REST APIs, you can get first transcription in under 30 minutes: sign up, get API key, and use the playground or SDK. For a full integration into a voice agent, expect a few hours. GladiaFlow dictation app works immediately after installing and adding your API key.
Switching to or from Gladia
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From AssemblyAI: Use Gladia's migration guide and adapt SDK calls; endpoints differ but both provide JSON output.
- →From Deepgram: Use Gladia's migration guide to map WebSocket messages and configuration.
- ↗To Deepgram: If you need English-only ultralow WER, export transcripts and re-process.
- ↗To AssemblyAI: Similar feature set, but you'll lose multilingual and bundled intelligence.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Official links
Tools that pair well with Gladia
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Gladia, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Gladia vs Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud and Gladia serve completely different domains: Spider Cloud extracts structured web data for AI agents and RAG, while Gladia transcribes and enriches audio. Choose Spider Cloud if your AI needs live web content; choose Gladia if you're building voice products. Both offer freemium entry with competitive pay-as-you-go pricing, but their feature sets don't overlap. No direct competition.
Gladia vs Temporal Ai
Temporal and Gladia serve fundamentally different needs: Temporal is for orchestrating durable, crash-proof workflows and AI agents, while Gladia is for high-speed, multilingual audio transcription and intelligence. Choose Temporal if you need to build reliable, long-running workflows with automatic retries and state recovery; choose Gladia if you need sub-300ms real-time transcription with speaker diarization and audio insights. They can be complementary—Temporal could orchestrate Gladia calls for transcription workflows.
Gladia vs Voyage Ai
Choose Voyage AI if your priority is high-accuracy retrieval on domain-specific documents (finance, legal, code) with long-context embeddings and cost-efficient vector storage. Choose Gladia if you need real-time, low-latency transcription across 100+ languages for voice products, meetings, or contact centers. Gladia's freemium model suits smaller teams, while Voyage AI requires custom enterprise pricing.
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