Gladia

Gladia achieved the top position in the 2026 async STT benchmark (8 providers, 7 datasets, 74 hours of audio), with Solaria-1 delivering an average 29% lower Word Error Rate on conversational speech and up to 3× lower Diarization Error Rate than competing APIs. Supports 100+ languages including 42 unavailable on any other mainstream API (Bengali, Punjabi, Tagalog, Persian, Kazakh, Haitian Creole). Native code-switching across the full language set. Speaker diarization powered by pyannoteAI's Precision-2 model is bundled into the base rate (not sold as an add-on). EU data residency available — a key differentiator for European teams. Bundled pricing philosophy: ~$0.50/hr on Scaling plan includes most features without stacking add-on costs. Best for: async transcription of messy real-world audio with multilingual speakers, accents, and background noise.