Buzz vs Gladia

Buzz is a free desktop application for transcribing and translating audio on a personal computer, using OpenAI’s Whisper. It accepts audio and video files, YouTube links, and live microphone audio. Its tools include speech separation, speaker identification, a searchable transcript viewer, keyboard shortcuts, and a watch folder for automatic transcription. Transcripts can be exported as TXT, SRT, or VTT files. Buzz supports Whisper, Whisper.cpp, Faster Whisper, and compatible models from Hugging Face. After downloading the necessary models and copying them to a computer, it can work without an internet connection; it can also use the OpenAI API for remote recognition when an API key is set in Preferences. A command-line interface supports scripting, while a plugin system includes examples such as AI summaries and transcript resizing. Smaller models run faster but may be less accurate; larger models need more capable hardware or more time. Buzz requires AVX2 CPU support. On macOS it requires Apple silicon, and the Windows app is unsigned and may trigger an installation warning.

Gladia provides audio infrastructure through an API for recording, transcribing, and enriching audio. It offers asynchronous and real-time transcription, including live streaming, with Starter supporting 100+ languages and automatic language detection and switching. Listed audio tools include speaker diarization, sentiment analysis, PII redaction, entity detection, and audio-to-LLM processing. Developers can use Python or Node.js SDKs, WebSocket streaming, or REST uploads; named integrations include Pipecat, LiveKit, Twilio, Retell, Zapier, Make, and n8n. Transcripts can include speaker labels and timestamps, and SRT and VTT are listed export formats. Starter is listed at free and includes 50€ in one-time credits that do not expire. Flexible pay-as-you-go Starter rates are $0.61 a month for asynchronous transcription and $0.75 a month for real-time transcription. Hourly call and total audio limits vary by tier. Gladia also offers GladiaFlow, a desktop voice dictation app for Mac and Windows; its code is available under the MIT license.