AssemblyAI

It's live in the playground now. Talk to it, watch the turnaround, then run the same request against the API. Try it: lnkd.in/e69qa3vf

And no minimums: you're billed for the audio you send. Short utterances don't get rounded up to a billing floor, which matters when your workload is thousands of 5-second commands.

It's also a natural fit for voice agents. When an agent needs a complete utterance transcribed between turns, like a captured voicemail, a confirmation, or a quick voice input mid-flow, Sync returns the full text in one shot, no stream to manage.

Sync is the tier where dictation lives. Voice notes, clinical documentation, voice commands, form-fill: anywhere someone talks in short bursts and expects the words to just be there. youtube.com/watch?v=kbYbuk…

➡️ Realtime: text appears while they speak (live captions, real-time conversation) ➡️ Sync: text arrives right after they stop (~134ms) ➡️ Async: text is ready whenever the job's done (batch, long files)

The Sync API is here. Synchronous speech-to-text, built for the moment right after someone stops speaking, with text back in as few as ~134ms. Speech-to-text now comes in three speeds:

Speech-to-text is more than a transcription layer—it's a key part of how voice agents understand users. This article by @AssemblyAI explores why speech recognition quality has a major impact on voice agent accuracy and user experience:

We mispronounced every single item on the menu. Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime got all of them right anyway. 👇 Check out @martschweiger tutorial where he spun up a restaurant ordering agent on @livekit to put our latest model to the test. He ordered escargots à la bourguignonne, khachapuri adjaruli, kouign-amann, yuzu kombucha—the kind of proper nouns that usually wreck speech-to-text, and Universal-3.5-Pro Realtime transcribed each one perfectly. The reason it worked: agent context carryover. Most speech models transcribe each moment in isolation. Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime is the first to natively use the conversation's context—like the menu items your agent just listed—to sharpen what comes next. With Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime in LiveKit, turn on agent context carryover and the context flows into the model automatically.

Our team can't stop talking about the World Cup—so @martschweiger pointed our newest model, Universal-3.5 Pro, at a bilingual Cristiano Ronaldo interview to see how it handles the parts most models fumble. He switches between Portuguese and English mid-sentence. Universal-3.5 Pro transcribes both, natively. Then we pasted the YouTube description in as context, and it caught his Portuguese nickname "Cris," the interviewers' TV stations, and the club he was talking about. The same is true for the domains this model is built for: clinical documentation, contact center calls, and meeting recordings. See Universal-3.5 Pro in action👇

Universal-3.5 Pro Async is here — native code-switching across 18 languages, our best speaker diarization yet, and contextual prompting. All at $0.21/hr. Learn more: assemblyai.com/blog/universal…

Ordering a prescription by voice leaves no room for "close enough." Drug names, dosages, patient details—every word has to land. @stefanjblos built a voice agent that does exactly that—and gets the messy, high-stakes language of medicine.

Clicky by @FarzaTV is powered by @AssemblyAI Universal 3 Pro streaming model. I cloned it and upgraded it to Universal 3.5 to show how our newest realtime model can actively listen with context. The page itself becomes context for the speech model. As you scroll, Clicky updates Universal 3.5 with key terms from the screen so it can accurately recognize technical jargon, APIs, code, and other terms that speech models typically struggle to transcribe. Instead of guessing, the model already knows what to listen for.

C, Sí, or Sea?? The context carryover feature of Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime knows 🤓

➡️ Read the full launch blog: assemblyai.com/blog/universal… ➡️ Watch the demo: assemblyai.com/blog/universal…

Watch the video below for a full demo of how amazing our new Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime model is. Live, real demos always beat generic benchmarks! Available today in our API, Playground, and partner integrations.

Until today, a transcription model never knew what your voice agent just asked. The one we're launching today does. Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime from AssemblyAI is the first realtime speech-to-text model that takes your agent's side of the conversation as context. When your agent asks for an email and the caller rattles it off, the model already knows an email is coming, and captures it perfectly. Same for an order number read fast, an account ID, a medication, or a name spelled out over poor quality phone line.