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AssemblyAI vs IBM Watson Speech To Text comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AssemblyAI
Ranking in Speech-To-Text Services
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Watson Speech To Text
Ranking in Speech-To-Text Services
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Speech-To-Text Services category, the mindshare of AssemblyAI is 6.7%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Speech To Text is 4.5%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Speech-To-Text Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AssemblyAI6.7%
IBM Watson Speech To Text4.5%
Other88.8%
Speech-To-Text Services
 

Featured Reviews

Leen Batta - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Developer at a university with 10,001+ employees
Automated workflows have transformed classroom videos into instant interactive study content
While AssemblyAI performs exceptionally well, there are a few areas where the developer experience could be further improved. First, regarding native video file support, currently, developers must write custom back-end logic to extract the audio track from video files locally before uploading. If AssemblyAI supported direct native video uploads and handled the audio extraction internally on their servers, it would simplify our back-end architecture. Native real-time status updates could also be improved because while the API is highly stable, writing custom asynchronous polling loops to check transcription status adds boilerplate code. Lastly, the queue latency for micro-files could be optimized because we noticed some initial queue or warm-up latency when transcribing very short audio files under one minute.
it_user964722 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Transformation and Automation Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Easy to understand, configure, and use
I would recommend it. IBM has several other solutions that can connect to it, so no need to buy different pieces from several providers. If you want to find a good solution for the customer and put some translation tool or machine learning for text understanding and so on, you can get this from IBM. It can be a one-stop shop for a good solution. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It has good quality, and it's easy to work with.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"AssemblyAI has positively impacted my organization as it is in our active pipeline, making it one of the core building blocks of our product that we are currently making."
"The best features AssemblyAI offers are transcription and real-time transcriptions, and the speed of real-time transcription stands out to me because it's 20 to 40% faster than the industry benchmark, so speed is definitely one of the pros of AssemblyAI."
"AssemblyAI has positively impacted my organization because by using it, both our story narrators and story readers benefit greatly."
"AssemblyAI can make work really easier and faster, because why would I wish to spend more than four to five hours on a single one-hour transcript if with AssemblyAI I can do it within forty minutes?"
"After shifting to AssemblyAI, the biggest two points we experienced were that the speed of our software increased and our costing of the API reduced."
"What stood out to me about the speech-to-text feature of AssemblyAI was the speed, accuracy, and ease of integration."
"AssemblyAI has positively impacted our organization in terms of user experience, providing clear information to users because it can understand user intent properly, and users are happy because the AI agent can respond to them positively and perfectly in their language regardless of how they communicate."
"I would suggest others to go for AssemblyAI because it is the best in the market in terms of accuracy, outputs, and the different languages that it caters to and transcribes."
"It was easy to understand, easy to configure, and easy to use."
"IBM has several other solutions that can connect to it, so no need to buy different pieces from several providers."
 

Cons

"The only point where I think AssemblyAI can be improved is in the export functionality."
"I believe the streaming process accuracy should improve, and I also wish for a proper application for normal users, not just for developers, so they can easily convert audio."
"AssemblyAI could be improved because the accuracy drops noticeably with a heavy accent or a very fast speaker, and pricing can become expensive at a high volume, so better multi-support or more affordable enterprise pricing tiers would make it significantly more competitive."
"I wish AssemblyAI could improve its multilingual support, as it did not work well when I spoke in different languages."
"I think the documentation could be improved a bit because it is a little difficult to follow for the first-time user."
"AssemblyAI needs to be more accurate, particularly with regard to spelling."
"AssemblyAI should respond more quickly because when I post a ticket, they take too much time to respond to it."
"AssemblyAI can be improved; I think they should manage their webhooks better to retrieve my data as soon as possible for my audio."
"The quality needs to be updated. For speech to text, support for additional languages can be included. For example, support for the large markets in Eastern Europe, such as Polish or Romanian, would be nice."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
35%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Wholesaler/Distributor
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AssemblyAI?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I would like to know if it can be reduced somehow, but apart from that, licensing is good enough for us.
What needs improvement with AssemblyAI?
AssemblyAI can be improved in several areas. I don't remember if AssemblyAI had a webhook, but if they have one, that's beneficial. The biggest improvement I think was the lack of background sound....
What is your primary use case for AssemblyAI?
My main use case for AssemblyAI was for a voice-based calling system that we created. A specific example of how I used AssemblyAI in my voice-based calling system is that it was used for the text-t...
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
American Airlines, UBank, Bitly, Eurobits
Find out what your peers are saying about Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Microsoft and others in Speech-To-Text Services. Updated: August 2026.
911,493 professionals have used our research since 2012.