Baidu Speech

Partly. Baidu Speech has a free tier with paid plans above it — published pricing: free tier + tiered RMB-per-call. Free-tier limits change more often than this page does; verify on the vendor's pricing page.

Baidu Speech is an API — you call it from whatever you build, on any platform with an HTTP client.

Baidu Speech is used through its API: get a key from the vendor, then call it from your own code. There is no desktop app to install.

Chinese-first docs and console; English language quality has historically trailed peers.

China-only deployments anchored on Baidu's stack (DuerOS, Apollo, smart device).

No. Baidu Speech is a proprietary API from Baidu AI Cloud. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.

Baidu Speech is made by Baidu AI Cloud.

In this directory Baidu Speech is filed under commercial api, hyperscaler, regional asia as a API.

There is a side-by-side page at /tools/baidu-speech-alternatives comparing Baidu Speech with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.

Yes. If what you want is transcripts rather than the tool itself, Whipscribe does the same job as a hosted API: submit a file or URL, poll a job id, pull the result as txt, json, srt, vtt or docx. $0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. The automation recipes on this site show it wired to Drive folders, Zoom recordings, S3 buckets and no-code platforms.

Baidu Speech is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training, and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export.

$0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $2.16, a thousand-hour archive is about $720 once. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, so you can see what your recording holds before paying anything.

Three things are moving across the whole speech-to-text market right now: summaries, action items and speaker insights generated on top of the transcript rather than sold separately; private, secured deployment where the audio never leaves a boundary you control; and agent access — transcription exposed as a tool that Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner can call directly. Whipscribe ships all three today: per-job insights, our own servers, and an MCP server.