Montreal Forced Aligner

by MontrealCorpusTools

Word-level alignment via Kaldi for 100+ languages.

TL;DR

Word-level alignment via Kaldi for 100+ languages.

Best for linguists + TTS data prep needing phoneme-level alignments. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
Stars
Last push
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, macOS, Windows

What it is

The standard tool for forced alignment in academic linguistics. MIT.

Best for: Linguists + TTS data prep needing phoneme-level alignments.
Watch out for: Not for free-form transcription; needs text + audio + pron dict.

Install / use

conda install -c conda-forge montreal-forced-aligner

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported100
HIPAA eligibleNo

Montreal Forced Aligner vs Whipscribe

FeatureMontreal Forced AlignerWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfreefree beta
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages10099
PlatformsLinux, macOS, WindowsWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to Montreal Forced Aligner

Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.