What is AssemblyAI API?

AssemblyAI offers a powerful API that provides state-of-the-art AI models for transcribing and understanding speech. It allows developers to easily convert audio and video files into text, and gain deeper insights through features like sentiment analysis, speaker diarization, and content moderation. It’s designed for building a wide range of applications that rely on voice data.

Key Features

High-Accuracy Transcription: Utilizes advanced deep learning models to provide highly accurate transcriptions for both pre-recorded and real-time streaming audio.
Speaker Diarization: Identifies and labels different speakers in a single audio stream, making it easy to follow conversations.
Sentiment Analysis: Analyzes the transcribed text to determine the emotional tone (positive, negative, neutral) of the speech.
PII Redaction: Automatically detects and redacts sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from transcriptions to ensure privacy and compliance.
Entity Detection: Identifies and extracts key entities such as names, dates, locations, and organizations from the audio content.
Summarization: Provides abstractive summaries of long audio files, highlighting the most important information.

Use Cases

Meeting Transcription: Automatically transcribe virtual meetings, interviews, and conference calls to create searchable records and action items.
Call Center Analytics: Analyze customer support calls to track sentiment, identify trends, and improve agent performance.
Media Content Analysis: Transcribe podcasts, videos, and broadcasts to create captions, subtitles, and enable content search.
Voice-Controlled Applications: Build voice-activated assistants, dictation software, and other hands-free user interfaces.

Getting Started

Getting started with AssemblyAI is straightforward. First, you need to get a free API key from the AssemblyAI website.

Here’s a simple “Hello World” example using the Python SDK to transcribe an audio file from a URL:

```python import assemblyai as aai

Your API key

aai.settings.api_key = “YOUR_API_KEY”

URL of the audio file to transcribe

FILE_URL = “https://storage.googleapis.com/aai-web-samples/espn-bears.m4a”

Create a transcriber object

transcriber = aai.Transcriber()

Start the transcription

transcript = transcriber.transcribe(FILE_URL)

if transcript.status == aai.TranscriptStatus.error: print(transcript.error) else: print(transcript.text)

Example Output:

“It’s a different kind of season for the Bears, a different kind of team…”

Pricing

AssemblyAI operates on a freemium, pay-as-you-go pricing model. It offers a generous free tier for developers to get started, which includes a significant number of hours for both pre-recorded and streaming transcription. Beyond the free tier, pricing is based on the volume of audio processed per hour. Advanced features like sentiment analysis and PII redaction are available as add-ons with their own pricing structures. Custom enterprise plans are also available for large-scale deployments.

AssemblyAI API