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AssemblyAI vs Vivu

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. Both ship a public API.

AssemblyAISpeech-to-text API priced by the hour of audioVivuTurns a company's video library into a queryable context source AI agents can pull from via API or MCP.

Side by side

FactAssemblyAIVivu
CategorySpeech-to-Text & TranscriptionVideo Analysis & Search
Pricing modelPaidContact
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsAPIWeb, API
CompanyAssemblyAI, Inc.Vivu Inc.
Launched2017—
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 1, 2026

What our research says

AssemblyAI

The transcription API to reach for when accuracy and per-hour pricing matter more than a user interface, but the headline rate is a base rate and every label you actually want adds to it.

Pros

  • $50 of credits at signup with no card required
  • Per-hour rates are published plainly and undercut most incumbents
  • Add-ons cover diarisation, redaction, summarisation and medical vocabulary
  • Voice Agent API is one flat $0.075/min covering model and speech too

Cons

  • No product surface at all — everything is code
  • Add-ons stack, so the real rate usually lands well above $0.15/hr
  • Streaming diarisation costs six times the async equivalent
  • No volume discounts published on the pricing page

Vivu

Vivu addresses a specific infrastructure gap -- making a company's existing video footage queryable by AI agents the same way text documents already are -- rather than building another consumer video tool. It's early enough that there's no self-serve product or public pricing yet, so evaluating it means booking a demo rather than testing it directly.

Pros

  • Team background in video AI at scale (cited prior work reaching 10M+ users, 100M+ hours of video)
  • Offers both a direct API and an MCP server for agent integration
  • Targets a concrete, underserved problem (video as agent context) rather than a crowded consumer category

Cons

  • No public pricing or self-serve access
  • No named customers or case studies visible on the site
  • Early-stage product with limited independent verification of claims

Which one fits

Choose AssemblyAI if you need

  • Developers embedding transcription into call, meeting or media products
  • Teams needing speaker labels, redaction and summaries from one vendor
  • Voice-agent builders who want recognition, reasoning and speech on a single bill

Choose Vivu if you need

  • Companies with large unindexed video libraries wanting to expose them to AI agents
  • Teams already building on MCP who want video as an additional context source
  • Robotics or support teams whose institutional knowledge lives in recorded video

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