Gladia vs Google Cloud Speech-to-Text

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.

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text converts audio into text and provides APIs for adding speech recognition to applications. It offers synchronous, asynchronous, and streaming recognition for post-processing, periodic, or real-time results, and lists support for 85+ languages and variants. Model adaptation lets users provide hints for domain-specific terms, rare words, and phrases. Speaker diarization can predict which speaker produced each utterance; the service also supports multichannel recognition and says it can handle noisy audio without additional noise cancellation. Specialized models are available for voice control, phone calls, and video transcription. API v2 includes data residency, audit logging, and customer-managed encryption keys. Speech-to-Text On-Prem runs in private data centers and is offered through a sales contact. Developer access includes REST and RPC APIs, client libraries, and command-line quickstarts. Listed pricing includes Speech-to-Text V2 API standard recognition models at $0.02 a month, billed at $0.016 / 1 minute for 0–500,000 minutes, with lower rates at higher monthly volumes; V1 standard plans include 60 free minutes per month. Costs depend on duration, channel count, model, batch method, and API version, with each channel billed separately.