About Deepgram
Deepgram is a commercial voice AI company that provides APIs for turning speech into text, text into speech, and building spoken agents. It is aimed at developers and enterprises that need transcription or voice interfaces inside their own products.
The platform covers four areas: speech-to-text for real-time and batch transcription, text-to-speech with expressive voices, a voice agent API, and audio intelligence for extracting insight from conversations. Its Flux models are described as handling turn-taking, interruptions and conversational context. The voice agent API combines speech recognition, language model orchestration and speech synthesis behind one interface, so developers do not have to stitch separate components together.
Deepgram runs as a hosted cloud service, and the homepage states that deployment can also be self-hosted. There is a free sign-up path, a playground for trying the models and a pricing page.
Key features
- Real-time and batch speech-to-text
- Text-to-speech with expressive voices
- Unified voice agent API
- Turn-taking and interruption handling
- Audio intelligence for call insights
- Cloud or self-hosted deployment
Good fit for
- →Building conversational voice agents
- →Transcribing calls and meetings
- →Adding speech output to applications
- Tags
- speech-to-text
- text-to-speech
- voice-ai
- transcription
- voice-agents
- api
- ai-infrastructure
Deepgram: questions and answers
- What is Deepgram used for?
- Deepgram offers speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice agent APIs for transcription and conversational voice applications. It is a good fit for building conversational voice agents, transcribing calls and meetings, and adding speech output to applications.
- How much does Deepgram cost?
- Deepgram is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based speech AI billed per minute. Pre-recorded Nova-3 monolingual transcription is $0.0043/min on Pay As You Go and $0.0036/min on Growth; custom models are quoted by sales.
- Is Deepgram open source?
- No. Deepgram is proprietary (closed-source) software. Open-source alternatives to Deepgram include whisper.cpp, Whisper and LocalAI.
- Can I self-host Deepgram?
- Yes. Although Deepgram is closed source, it can be self-hosted on your own servers, and the vendor also offers a hosted version.
- What are some alternatives to Deepgram?
- Deepgram competes with AssemblyAI, Speechmatics and ElevenLabs. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Deepgram alternatives.
Open-source alternatives to Deepgram
See all
whisper.cpp
AI Infrastructure
Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++
MITvs Deepgram★ 54k
Whisper
AI Infrastructure
Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision
MITvs Deepgram★ 110k
LocalAI
AI Infrastructure
LocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video -
MITvs ChatGPT★ 49k
PrivateGPT
AI Infrastructure
Complete API layer for private AI applications on local models: RAG, skills, tools, MCP, t
Apache-2.0vs ChatGPT★ 58k
SGLang
AI Infrastructure
SGLang is a high-performance serving framework for large language models and multimodal mo
Apache-2.0vs Amazon Bedrock★ 37k
Paddler
AI Infrastructure
Open-source LLM/VLM load balancer and serving platform for self-hosting LLMs (and VLMs) at
Apache-2.0★ 1.7k
SaaS alternatives to Deepgram
See all
AssemblyAI
AI Infrastructure
Speech recognition and audio intelligence API for transcription
SaaS
Speechmatics
AI Infrastructure
Speech recognition API supporting many languages and real-time transcription
SaaS
ElevenLabs
AI Tools
Text-to-speech, voice cloning, dubbing and speech-to-text with an API
SaaS
OpenAI API Platform
AI Infrastructure
Developer API and platform for accessing OpenAI models like GPT for text, vision and audio
SaaS
Vapi
AI Tools
Developer platform for building and deploying voice AI agents
SaaS
Retell AI
AI Tools
Platform for building AI phone agents for call handling
SaaS

