Best transcription API with speaker diarization
Need to know who spoke when — meetings, interviews, multi-speaker calls? ElevenLabs Scribe v2 is the top-ranked offering with built-in diarization, alongside word timestamps and custom vocabulary. AssemblyAI Universal-3 Pro and Deepgram Nova-3 also return native speaker labels; OpenAI's base transcribe model and Google Gemini do not, needing extra tooling. Diarization quality isn't separately scored here, so this order is accuracy-led. A light estimate from public docs.
DefaultElevenLabs Scribe v2met diarisatieElevenLabs Scribe v2
Provider offerings
| Offering | Price ($/1000 min) | WER | Langs | Latency | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs Scribe v2ElevenLabs | 3.67 | 2.2% | 90 | 150 ms | diarizationtimestampsvocab |
| AssemblyAI Universal-3 ProAssemblyAI | 3.5 | 3.1% | 99 | 150 ms | diarizationtimestampsvocab |
| Deepgram Nova-3Deepgram | 4.3 | 5.2% | 50 | 300 ms | diarizationtimestampsvocab |
| Speechmatics EnhancedSpeechmatics | 6.7 | 4% | 70 | 500 ms | diarizationtimestampsvocab |
| OpenAI gpt-4o-transcribeOpenAI | 6 | 4% | — | — | — |
| Google Gemini 3 FlashGoogle | 1.92* | 2.9% | — | — | — |
* token-/credit-priced — the headline understates real per-unit cost, so it is excluded from the cheapest ranking.
Sources
- Artificial Analysis — Speech to Text2026-06-19
- Open ASR Leaderboard2026-06-19