Top Speech Recognition Startups in 2026

AssemblyAI is a remote-first company building powerful AI models for developers, startups, and enterprises to transcribe and understand their audio data. Our mission is to make production-ready, state-of-the-art AI models accessible to developers and product teams at extremely large scale through simple APIs. Customers, including Spotify, Algolia, Dow Jones, Happy Scribe, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and NBCUniversal, use our APIs to transcribe and understand millions of videos, podcasts, phone calls, and zoom meetings every day. Our APIs power innovative products like conversational intelligence platforms, meeting summarizers, content moderation, and automatic closed captioning. We're growing at breakneck speed, and recently announced our Series B round. We've raised $63M in total funding, backed by leading investors including Insight Partners, Accel, Y Combinator, Patrick and John Collision (Founders of Stripe), Nat Friedman (Former CEO of GitHub), and Daniel Gross (Entrepreneur & Investor in companies including GitHub, Uber & SpaceX). Our team is made up of problem solvers, innovators, and top AI researchers from companies like DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta AI, Amazon and Apple. They conduct cutting-edge AI research and develop novel algorithms and techniques to continually push the state-of-the-art in speech recognition and NLP. Join our world-class, remote team and help us build an iconic deep learning company!

Observe.AI, a leader in Contact Center AI, transforms customer experiences and improves agent performance by helping top brands analyze 100% of interactions, extract actionable sentiment and interaction insights, and streamline workflows. With Observe.AI, businesses transcribe every interaction with high accuracy and coach agents while gaining full visibility into their customer service operations. Observe.AI brings the power of agent assistance, automatic speech recognition, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to modern contact centers and their frontline teams. Observe.AI is trusted by more than 160 customers and partners, including National Debt Relief, Root Insurance, Alcon Laboratories, and Pearson. Backed by Menlo Ventures, Next47, NGP Capital, Emergent Ventures, Scale Ventures, Nexus Ventures, and Y-Combinator, Observe.AI’s headquarters is in San Francisco with an office in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit observe.ai.

Hey, we’re Deepgram! We’re an AI speech platform whose mission is to make every voice heard and understood. Our end-to-end deep neural network is revolutionizing the speech-to-text market and taking on the big guys. We’re redefining what companies can do with voice by offering a platform with AI architectural advantage, not legacy tech retrofitted with AI. Deepgram delivers highly accurate, actually usable transcription, right out of the box – or you can train a model for even greater accuracy on the unique words that matter to you. ✅ Live-stream or pre-recorded ✅ On-prem or in the cloud ✅ Scalable and affordable ✅ Dozens of languages and use case models ✅ Features like diarization, summarization, language/topic detection, and more. We’ve raised over $86 million and have been recognized as an Inc. Best Workplace (2021 and 2022), a Forbes Top 50 AI Company to Watch (2021), and a CB Insights Top 100 AI Startup (2021), among others. Come join our revolution to unlock the power of voice technology for everyone. We want to hear what you’ve got to say! An NVIDIA partner and Y Combinator company

We are building the next generation of voice AI and LLM platforms: - It is on-device - It runs anywhere, from Arduino to web browsers - It beats FAANG in accuracy, latency, and reliability

Our mission is to reinvent the way people learn, starting with language. Learning a language can change a life by opening doors to new cultures, careers, and communities. Two billion people around the world are actively trying to learn a language, but the best way to learn (one-on-one tutoring) is hard to access at scale and hasn’t been meaningfully improved in decades. Speak is building a human-level, AI-powered tutor in your pocket: a conversation-first experience that lets learners actually speak, get instant feedback, and progress through carefully designed lessons. The result is a complete path from beginner to confident speaker across multiple languages. Speak first launched in South Korea in 2019, where Speak has now become the number one language learning app, and we now serve learners across many markets and 15+ languages. Speak is one of the world’s leading AI companies, with over $150m raised in venture investment from OpenAI, Accel, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and more, with a distributed team across San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, and Ljubljana.

Volley builds the best voice-controlled games and entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smartphones, and Fire TVs. Popular Volley voice games include Song Quiz, Jeopardy!, and The Price Is Right. Our voice apps are used by millions of people every month. We believe voice control will become the main way people access entertainment in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and cars, and our goal is to become the "Netflix of Voice" for this emerging category of devices. Volley was founded by Max Child and James Wilsterman in 2016. We're a 60+ person hybrid remote/in-person company, headquartered in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. While we work to make home entertainment more accessible and engaging, we like to have fun along the way, with team lunches, Friday happy hours, and very active #food and #pets slack channels. If any of this sounds fun to you (we promise it is), come join us! Read more about Volley's culture and mission here: volleythat.com/post/volley-mission-culture-and-what-we-create

TELUS International AI Data Solutions Creating and enhancing the world's data to enable better AI via human intelligence We help companies test and improve machine learning models via our global AI Community of 1 million+ annotators and linguists. Our proprietary Ground Truth AI training platform handles all data types across 500+ languages and dialects. Our AI Data Solutions vastly enhance AI systems across a range of applications from advanced smart products, to better search results, to expanded speech recognition, to more human-like bot interactions and so much more. TELUS International values people diversity and grants equal opportunity regardless of age, civil status, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion and political beliefs, sex or sexual orientation.

Speechmatics are global experts in deep learning and speech recognition, providing technology that understands every voice. We have built the most accurate and inclusive speech-to-text engine available, which is now working with an amazing mix of global companies. We are VC backed, in the final stages of growth fundraising. Joining us means working with some of the smartest minds around the world, focused on cutting-edge projects and deploying the latest techniques to disrupt the market. We believe in putting people first; we’ll do all we can to help you develop your skills and give you the tools you need to thrive. We support people to work wherever they work best and also understand the importance of coming together to collaborate, socialise and build relationships. This is only the beginning; we’re looking for amazing people like you to continue our journey…

We’re on a mission to make every human superintelligent. Our first product is a personalized AI like Jarvis in your pocket powered by everything you see and hear, that learns with you, remembers your entire life, and helps proactively before you even ask.

Next generation speech synthesis