Sembly AI
Multilingual AI meeting assistant with searchable team knowledge base.
Drop your audio. Transcript in seconds. First transcript free, then $2 a file or $8 = 1,000 min
Best for distributed teams that need meeting transcription across many languages plus a searchable post-meeting knowledge base. Pricing: free / from $15/mo.
What it is
Sembly is a meeting bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex calls. It transcribes in over forty languages, produces structured meeting notes (key items, decisions, risks, action items), and indexes everything in a team-wide knowledge base that supports cross-meeting search. The Sembly Workstream feature aggregates tasks across meetings into a single backlog. Enterprise plans add SSO, audit logs, and customer-managed encryption keys. Sembly has been around since 2020 and is one of the older players in this category.
Watch out for: Bot UX is functional but less polished than Otter/Fathom; AI quality depends on the language.
Install / use
sembly.ai — Personal free, Professional $15/mo, Team $20/user/mo, Enterprise contact
What people actually do with Sembly AI-style transcription
The tool is the means. These are the jobs — each one priced at published rates, each one wired up on its own page.
Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | No |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | None |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Sembly AI vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Sembly AI | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Products | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | Not verified | $8–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · free instant preview |
| Speaker diarization | Not verified | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Not verified | Yes |
| Streaming | Not verified | No |
| Languages | — | 99 |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android | Web, API, MCP |
Where this category is heading
From the vendor changelogs we track weekly — what changed in August 2026, and what it means if you are choosing now.
AssemblyAI moved summarisation onto an LLM this month; every vendor is racing to return action items, quotes and topics with the text rather than as an add-on.
Whipscribe today Every Whipscribe job already returns an insights payload — summary, key quotes, topics and speakers — from the same job id, at no extra charge.
Deepgram shipped self-hosted container images in August — the market is moving toward audio that stays inside a boundary the customer controls, because teams with customer calls or unreleased material are refusing shared model endpoints.
Whipscribe today Whipscribe runs on our own GPUs in a private, secured cloud. Audio is never forwarded to OpenAI or any third-party model.
The fastest-growing way to use a transcription API is not a form — it is Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner calling it mid-task through MCP.
Whipscribe today Whipscribe ships an MCP server: transcribe, search and summarise from an assistant without wiring anything.
AssemblyAI's 1.0 SDK unified async, realtime and sync; Deepgram's CLI went to 0.3. The unit of work is becoming the folder or the bucket, not the file.
Whipscribe today Submit with an Idempotency-Key and a batch_id, poll by job, retry safely. The S3 connector runs a whole prefix in one grant.
Deepgram added Afrikaans, Georgian and Armenian and improved a dozen more this month. Coverage is widening while quality still clusters around English and the large European languages.
Whipscribe today 99+ languages auto-detected. Ask for a language explicitly when you know it — auto-detect on a short or noisy clip is the most common cause of a wrong-language transcript.
Source: Deepgram and AssemblyAI changelogs, scanned 2026-08-24.
Alternatives to Sembly AI
Frequently asked about Sembly AI
Is Sembly AI free?
Partly. Sembly AI has a free tier with paid plans above it — published pricing: free / from $15/mo. Free-tier limits change more often than this page does; verify on the vendor's pricing page.
Does Sembly AI work on Mac, Windows and Linux?
Sembly AI runs on Web, iOS and Android.
How do I get started with Sembly AI?
There is nothing to install — Sembly AI is used in the browser. Create an account on the vendor's site and upload or connect your audio.
What are the limitations of Sembly AI?
Bot UX is functional but less polished than Otter/Fathom; AI quality depends on the language.
Who is Sembly AI best for?
Distributed teams that need meeting transcription across many languages plus a searchable post-meeting knowledge base.
Is Sembly AI open source?
No. Sembly AI is a proprietary product from Sembly AI Inc.. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.
Who makes Sembly AI?
Sembly AI is made by Sembly AI Inc..
What kind of tool is Sembly AI?
In this directory Sembly AI is filed under meetings, notetaker as a product.
What are the alternatives to Sembly AI?
There is a side-by-side page at /tools/sembly-alternatives comparing Sembly AI with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.
Can I automate Sembly AI-style transcription without running it myself?
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. $0.008 a minute — about $0.48 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.
How is Whipscribe different from Sembly AI?
Sembly AI is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. We run the models on our own GPUs in a private cloud — audio is never forwarded to OpenAI or any third-party model — and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. Your first transcript in the web app is free at any length, no card.
What does transcription cost if I use Whipscribe instead of Sembly AI?
$0.008 a minute — about $0.48 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $1.44, a thousand-hour archive is about $480 once. Your first transcript in the web app is free at any length, no card, so you can check accuracy on your own audio before paying anything.
Where is the Sembly AI category heading?
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 GPUs, and an MCP server.
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.
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