8 Alternatives to Azure for Voice AI STT on Vapi

Vapi now offers eight speech-to-text providers — Gladia, AssemblyAI, Deepgram, Cartesia, Talkscriber, OpenAI, Speechmatics and ElevenLabs — as drop-in alternatives to Azure for voice agents. Switching providers takes a single JSON parameter change, letting developers benchmark latency, cost and compliance. Gladia claims sub-100 ms end-to-end latency, AssemblyAI bundles summaries and PII redaction in one API call, and Cartesia runs fully on-premises.