Salad Redefines AI Transcription with Unmatched Accuracy and Ultra-Low Pricing

Salad Technologies announced the launch of its new AI-powered Batch Transcription API, promising unparalleled accuracy in speech-to-text technology at a significantly reduced cost compared to existing solutions.  This innovation marks a significant advancement for industries relying heavily on transcription services, addressing issues of affordability, accuracy, and scalability in AI-powered transcription solutions.

Historically, organizations across various sectors, such as customer service, media production, healthcare, legal, research, and education, to name a few,  have depended on accurate transcription services to enhance productivity, improve customer experiences, and ensure compliance and accuracy in data management.   At the same time, these organizations have often faced prohibitive costs, limiting their access to advanced transcription technologies.   

“There is an epidemic of overcharging in AI transcription today,” said Bob Miles, CEO of Salad Technologies.  “With Salad Transcription API, we’ve broken that cycle, delivering accuracy while cutting costs by up to 80%.  With in-house optimizations to existing models and an API powered by our distributed cloud, we’ve built the most powerful, cost-effective batch transcription API available today."

This is where Salad is really interesting.  Traditional transcription APIs typically rely on costly hyperscaler cloud GPUs; these expenses are passed on to users.  Salad, though, leverages a distributed GPU network, tapping into consumer-grade GPU resources in its SOC-2-compliant cloud infrastructure.  This significantly reduces computational costs and allows Salad to pass substantial savings onto its clients.  This approach not only benefits organizations financially, but also promotes environmental sustainability by optimizing existing, underutilized computing resources rather than continually expanding costly data center infrastructure.

Salad offers its full transcription API at $0.16 per hour; it also has a lower tier for a mere $0.03 per hour.  Salad Transcription Lite comes with an interesting trade-off in that it offers faster, near real-time transcription with “standard accuracy.”  The full Salad Transcription AP is slower, but offer what the company calls “No. 1 accuracy.”  It’s clear which uses more power – speed or accuracy – but with its two tiers, Salad gives even small-scale users and businesses with limited budgets access professional-grade transcription.

That’s the pricing side – but what about the accuracy.  After all, any AI, including transcription solutions, are only as good as their output. 

This is an area where Salad says it outperforms is competition. 

Based on Salad's own API benchmarking against the Common Voice dataset (a large-scale, open source collection of multilingual data created by Mozilla), its API comes in with the highest word accuracy rate and lowest word error rate across a range of languages, including English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Hindi, Thai, and Filipino.  Accuracy is critical and translates directly into tangible business benefits – fewer errors mean less manual editing and verification, saving substantial time and money. 

Interestingly, while Salad’s API performed very well against the English language, its best scores were when transcribing German, Russian, and Spanish.

Salad also ran benchmark tests against two other datasets – one a collection of recordings from TED Talks  and the other a collection of audio clips from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  Salad Transcription AP outperformed each of its competitors against these datasets as well, though, on average the difference was lower than against the Common Voice dataset.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a significant accuracy difference with Salad Transcription Lite, which had a higher Word Error Rate (WER) than other APIs – except for the TED Talk version, where it fell in the middle of the pack.  Take a look at the results yourself.

Salad's API is optimized for high-volume batch processing, capable of handling millions of monthly transcription hours.  This capability is critical for enterprises with large transcription needs, such as customer support centers, media organizations handling vast libraries of video and audio content, educational institutions transcribing lectures, and legal firms managing large volumes of court proceedings and depositions.  

Aside from its value and accuracy, Salad also has integrated several advanced features into its standard pricing model.  Unlike many other transcription services, where advanced features like translation, summarization, custom prompts, and adaptive vocabularies usually entail additional fees, Salad provides these at no extra cost as part of its value proposition.  This integrated approach simplifies procurement processes, budgeting, and operational workflows, as organizations no longer need to manage multiple licenses or additional charges for enhanced functionalities.  Users simply have access to all the tools they need.

Salad’s single-price offering eliminates many traditional trade-offs between cost and capability and organizations don’t need to sacrifice functionality or accuracy to meet tight budgets.  Instead, they receive high transcription accuracy, comprehensive multilingual translation capabilities, integrated summarization features, and customizable vocabularies to cater specifically to niche industries and specialized terminology.

“With this API, our goal is to democratize the AI transcription landscape and help companies realize massive cost savings for transcription with the industry’s best accuracy,” concluded Miles.