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Kaldi alternatives

Kaldi is a free, Apache-licensed C++ toolkit for speech recognition, with recipes and downloadable models for recognition, speaker identification, speech activity detection, diarization and language modeling. Researchers and professionals can build systems around its finite-state transducer integration and matrix library, and use it for real-time or offline recognition. It supports Linux and macOS, Android cross-compilation and WebAssembly, with on-device deployment. The project also permits commercial use and redistribution under Apache License 2.0.

  1. 1

    Notta

    by Notta
    Free plan AndroidExtensioniPhone+3

    Multilingual transcription with exports and timestamps — Notta offers a transcription product with 58 languages, 1,800 included minutes, speaker identification, timestamps and five export formats.

    7.3 Free plan · paid from $8.17/user/mo (annual) · 7-day trial Visit site
  2. 2

    Vosk

    Free plan AndroidAPIiPhone+4

    Offline streaming on lightweight devices — Vosk adds streaming recognition, vocabulary reconfiguration and offline use on lightweight devices, with support for more than 20 languages and dialects.

    7.0 Open source Visit site
  3. 3

    CMU Sphinx

    Free plan AndroidLinuxMac+2

    Low-resource speech apps and model training — CMU Sphinx focuses on low-resource recognition, with keyword spotting, grammar searches, word-level segmentation and acoustic model training tools.

    7.6 Open source Visit site
  4. 4

    Gladia

    by Gladia
    Free plan APIMacWeb+1

    Speech APIs across 100 languages — Gladia offers speech recognition through an API with 100 supported languages, speaker identification, timestamps and SRT or VTT exports.

    7.4 From $0.61 Visit site
  5. 5

    Speechmatics

    Free plan APILinuxMac+3

    Live and recorded speech APIs — Speechmatics provides APIs for speech-to-text, voice agents and text-to-speech, with live results in under one second and over 55 languages.

    7.1 Free plan · paid from $0.13 Visit site
  6. 6

    Superwhisper

    Free plan AndroidAPIiPhone+3

    Formatted dictation across apps — Superwhisper turns speech into formatted text across apps, with context-aware dictation and on-device offline models.

    7.1 Free plan · paid from $8.49/mo Visit site
  7. 7

    ESPnet

    by ESPnet
    Free plan Open source APILinuxMac+2

    End-to-end speech processing research — ESPnet covers a wider speech-processing scope, including text-to-speech, translation, enhancement and spoken language understanding alongside recognition.

    9.1 Open source Visit site
  8. 8

    Whisper

    Free plan Open source APILinuxMac+2
    8.5 Open source Visit site
  9. 9

    AssemblyAI

    Free plan APISelf-hostedWeb
    7.5 From $0.15 Visit site
  10. 10

    Azure AI Speech

    by Azure AI Speech
    Free plan APISelf-hostedWeb
    7.5 Free plan Visit site
  11. 11

    Amazon Transcribe

    Free plan APIWeb
    7.4 From $0.01 Visit site
  12. 12

    Google Cloud Speech-to-Text

    Free plan APISelf-hostedWeb
    7.3 From $0.00 Visit site
  13. 13

    NVIDIA Riva

    Free plan APILinuxSelf-hosted+1
    7.3 Free plan · paid from $1 · 90-day trial Visit site
  14. 14

    Otter.ai

    Free plan AndroidExtensioniPhone+2
    7.3 Free plan · paid from $8.33/user/mo (annual) Visit site
  15. 15

    ElevenLabs

    by ElevenLabs
    Free plan APIWeb
    7.2 Free plan · paid from $6/mo Visit site
  16. 16

    IBM Watson Speech to Text

    by IBM Watson Speech to Text
    Free plan APISelf-hosted
    7.1 Free plan Visit site
  17. 17

    SpeechRecognition

    Free plan APILinuxMac+2
    7.1 Free plan Visit site
  18. 18

    MacWhisper

    by MacWhisper
    Free plan iPhoneMac
    7.0 Free plan · paid from €64 Visit site
  19. 19

    Voice In

    Free plan ExtensionLinuxMac+1
    7.0 Free plan · 5-day trial Visit site
  20. 20

    Talon Voice

    Free plan LinuxMacWindows
    6.9 Free plan Visit site
  21. 21

    Soniox

    by Soniox
    Free plan API
    6.7 Free plan · paid from $19.99/mo Visit site
  22. 22

    Yandex SpeechKit

    Free plan APIWeb
    6.6 Free plan Visit site
  23. 23

    Picovoice Leopard

    Free trial AndroidAPIiPhone+5
    6.1 Pricing on request · 7-day trial Visit site
  24. 24

    Rev AI

    by Rev AI
    Free trial AndroidAPIiPhone+2
    6.1 From $0.01 Visit site

That flexibility comes with a specialist workflow: users clone and install source, and Kaldi says much of its documentation is written for experts. Windows compatibility is not actively maintained, and example scripts do not work there; some scripts use SRILM, which is not free for commercial use. Alternatives may offer a ready-to-use transcription app, streaming on lightweight devices, broader language coverage, speech APIs or text formatting across apps. Compare whether you need a toolkit for building models or a focused product, then weigh platforms, offline and live use, languages, deployment and price. The options below include free toolkits and freemium or paid services.

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