Gladia vs Kaldi

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.

Kaldi is a free, open-source C++ toolkit for speech recognition aimed at researchers and professionals. Its code and scripts cover methods including linear transforms, MMI, boosted MMI, MCE discriminative training and feature-space discriminative training. The toolkit integrates finite-state transducers through OpenFst and includes a matrix library that wraps standard BLAS and LAPACK routines. Example recipes support building speech recognition systems, and downloadable model archives cover speech recognition, speaker identification, speech activity detection, diarization and language modeling. The models may be used for any purpose. Kaldi is released under Apache License 2.0, which permits commercial use and redistribution. It runs on Linux distributions and Mac OS X, supports Android cross-compilation, and can be compiled to WebAssembly for browser execution. Windows compatibility is not actively maintained, and example scripts do not work there. Users obtain the current development version by cloning the GitHub repository and following its INSTALL file. Documentation is expert-oriented; the project directs help requests to its mailing list and bug reports or feature requests to GitHub issues.