{"slug": "soniox", "name": "Soniox", "category": "ai", "category_name": "AI tools and apps", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 4, "warners": 0, "score": 3.133, "rising": 1.67, "first": "2026-06-25", "latest": "2026-08-28", "why": "Never any mention of Soniox and they are on the Pareto frontier", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Never any mention of Soniox and they are on the Pareto frontier", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "soniox.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://soniox.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Soniox"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 791591872, "item_id": 49474492, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474492", "by": "low_tech_punk", "date": "2026-08-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But yes, Soniox is much cheaper.", "excerpt": "Soniox website has a live comparison demo: https://soniox.com/compare-stt For me, Gemini-3.5-Transcribe actually has slightly lower latency. Kudos to Soniox for both paying their competitor and letting them win. But yes, Soniox is much cheaper.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 791589648, "item_id": 49474353, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474353", "by": "lnalx", "date": "2026-08-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Soniox STT v5 is definitely the best", "excerpt": "I personally tested all the STT models for my real-time translator (https://fliptalk.ai). From language detection and accuracy in a noisy environment to the most important point: latency. At the moment, Soniox STT v5 is definitely the best, and I'm impressed by its performance. It's good that Google released Gemini-3.5-Transcribe, and it beats every other model on accuracy, but it definitely needs a bit more work on ", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 783448674, "item_id": 48965542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965542", "by": "k9294", "date": "2026-07-18", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Soniox rtt v5", "excerpt": "I'm founder of ottex.ai, I use stt pretty much all the time when work with AI and quite often for communications to draft emails and chat messages. I started ottex half a year ago after I tested gemini 2.5 flash native audio support. I was blown away by the quality of transcripts and decided to built an app to use it myself. Currently the default model in the app is Gemini 3 flash, but you can connect to 9 providers ", "context": "founder of ottex.ai", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"}, {"id": 752528624, "item_id": 47033039, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033039", "by": "lukax", "date": "2026-02-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Never any mention of Soniox and they are on the Pareto frontier", "excerpt": "Never any mention of Soniox and they are on the Pareto frontier[1] https://www.daily.co/blog/benchmarking-stt-for-voice-agents/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why Audio Is the One Area Small Labs Are Winning"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [{"by": "k9294", "context": "founder of ottex.ai", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965542", "date": "2026-07-18"}, {"by": "alder", "context": "built a flashcard app", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675277", "date": "2026-06-25"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["real-time speech recognition", "speech transcription", "audio transcription"], "compared": [], "makers": [{"id": 755600848, "item_id": 47225053, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47225053", "by": "lukax", "date": "2026-03-02", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Soniox also wins the independent benchmarks done by Daily, the company behind Pipecat.", "excerpt": "Or you could use Soniox Real-time (supports 60 languages) which natively supports endpoint detection - the model is trained to figure out when a user's turn ended. This always works better than VAD. https://soniox.com/docs/stt/rt/endpoint-detection Soniox also wins the independent benchmarks done by Daily, the company behind Pipecat. https://www.daily.co/blog/benchmarking-stt-for-voice-agents/ You can try a demo on t", "context": "former Soniox employee", "use_case": "real-time speech-to-text for voice agents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468818", "title": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911793", "title": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671886", "title": "Show HN: Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224295", "title": "Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999285", "title": "Why Audio Is the One Area Small Labs Are Winning", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891922", "title": "Soniox: Real-time transcription in 60 languages", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 791591872, "item_id": 49474492, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474492", "by": "low_tech_punk", "date": "2026-08-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But yes, Soniox is much cheaper.", "excerpt": "Soniox website has a live comparison demo: https://soniox.com/compare-stt For me, Gemini-3.5-Transcribe actually has slightly lower latency. Kudos to Soniox for both paying their competitor and letting them win. But yes, Soniox is much cheaper.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 791589648, "item_id": 49474353, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474353", "by": "lnalx", "date": "2026-08-28", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Soniox STT v5 is definitely the best", "excerpt": "I personally tested all the STT models for my real-time translator (https://fliptalk.ai). From language detection and accuracy in a noisy environment to the most important point: latency. At the moment, Soniox STT v5 is definitely the best, and I'm impressed by its performance. It's good that Google released Gemini-3.5-Transcribe, and it beats every other model on accuracy, but it definitely needs a bit more work on ", "context": "", "use_case": "Real-time speech recognition", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gemini-3.5-Transcribe"}, {"id": 783448674, "item_id": 48965542, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965542", "by": "k9294", "date": "2026-07-18", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Soniox rtt v5", "excerpt": "I'm founder of ottex.ai, I use stt pretty much all the time when work with AI and quite often for communications to draft emails and chat messages. I started ottex half a year ago after I tested gemini 2.5 flash native audio support. I was blown away by the quality of transcripts and decided to built an app to use it myself. Currently the default model in the app is Gemini 3 flash, but you can connect to 9 providers ", "context": "founder of ottex.ai", "use_case": "speech transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"}, {"id": 778804432, "item_id": 48675277, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675277", "by": "alder", "date": "2026-06-25", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "the transcriber API I use (Soniox) actually supports more than 60 languages", "excerpt": "Yes, the transcriber API I use (Soniox) actually supports more than 60 languages. I just didn't have any automated testing for them. The way I tested was to find audio with a reliable reference transcription and put it through my pipeline. Then compare the results. Also some languages don't have reliable libraries to get part of speech and lemmas, something that flashcard needs.", "context": "built a flashcard app", "use_case": "audio transcription", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice"}, {"id": 752528624, "item_id": 47033039, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033039", "by": "lukax", "date": "2026-02-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Never any mention of Soniox and they are on the Pareto frontier", "excerpt": "Never any mention of Soniox and they are on the Pareto frontier[1] https://www.daily.co/blog/benchmarking-stt-for-voice-agents/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why Audio Is the One Area Small Labs Are Winning"}, {"id": 750271056, "item_id": 46891941, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891941", "by": "lukax", "date": "2026-02-04", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "Also see how it compares to other providers:", "excerpt": "Also see how it compares to other providers: https://soniox.com/compare", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Soniox: Real-time transcription in 60 languages"}]}