Universal-2
Batch speech-to-text across 99 languages at the lowest per-minute rate among the established managed providers. Speech-understanding features — summarisation, topic detection, PII redaction — are billed on top, so compare the bundle rather than the base rate if you need them.
Pricing checked against provider documentation on . How we verify
universal-2 Price
$0.0025
/ audio min
Context
—
not token-based
Max output
—
varies
Pricing caveat: Batch transcription. Speech-understanding add-ons are billed separately.
Where Universal-2 fits
- Bulk media transcription
- Multilingual archives
- Meeting and call records
- Podcast and subtitle pipelines
Specifications
- API model ID
- universal-2
- Provider
- AssemblyAI
- Model family
- Universal
- Released
- November 2025
- Knowledge cutoff
- —
- Context window
- —
- Max output
- —
- Native reasoning
- No
- Relative latency
- medium
- Input modalities
- audio
- Output modalities
- text
- Open weights
- No
- Cached input
- —
- Batch discount
- —
Frequently asked
How much does Universal-2 cost?
Universal-2 is billed at $0.0025 / audio min.
What is Universal-2's context window?
Context limits for Universal-2 depend on the input format rather than a token count.
Is Universal-2 a reasoning model?
No. Universal-2 answers directly without a native thinking phase, which keeps latency and cost predictable.
What is Universal-2 best for?
Cheapest broad-language transcription. Batch speech-to-text across 99 languages at the lowest per-minute rate among the established managed providers. Speech-understanding features — summarisation, topic detection, PII redaction — are billed on top, so compare the bundle rather than the base rate if you need them.