Assemblyai — AI news & analysis

Google's new transcription model didn't reset the speech-to-text price floor — it finally brought Google down to it

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe entered public preview on 26 August 2026 at roughly $0.30 per audio-hour with diarization included, claiming 2.6% WER. The headline reads like a price war. The rate card says otherwise: Deepgram and AssemblyAI have been at or below that number for years. What actually got repriced by ~64% is Google's own Cloud Speech-to-Text. Here is the real comparison, the billing-model catch nobody is mentioning, and the session limits that decide whether you can use it at all.