OpenRouter has integrated ElevenLabs models, providing access to nine text-to-speech models and two speech-to-text models alongside an exclusive 50% discount through October 19.
AssemblyAI says streaming speech model Universal 3.6 Pro Realtime is now available and led two independent streaming benchmarks, including the lowest word error rate on covaldev’s live leaderboard for real voice-agent audio.
Tarush Agarwal reported a speech-to-text benchmark of 15 models on the same audio and pipeline. On 1,000 read-aloud clips from Pipecat FLEURS, AssemblyAI Universal 3.5 Pro had a 1.93% word error rate and a 489 ms median time to first text, both the best results in that test.
Artificial Analysis reports a transcription speed factor of 88x real time for StepAudio 3 ASR, behind three faster systems, near ElevenLabs Scribe v2 and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, and ahead of Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview.
Artificial Analysis says StepFun’s StepAudio 3 ASR is available through the StepFun API for non-streaming transcription, scoring 1.7% WER on the AA-WER Index, tied with Alibaba’s Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview and down from 4.7% for StepAudio 2.5 ASR. It transcribes at 88x real time and costs $0.40 per hour.
