assemblyai

What it is and what it does

AssemblyAI's Python SDK wraps the company's cloud-based audio transcription and understanding API, offering multiple transcriber classes for different use cases: prerecorded transcription with audio intelligence features (speaker labels, chapters, sentiment), synchronous batch transcription for short clips, and real-time streaming transcription for live audio. The SDK handles authentication, request/response serialization via pydantic, HTTP communication through httpx, and WebSocket streaming via websockets. It supports both synchronous and asynchronous workflows.

You provide audio as a local file path, URL, or binary data, configure transcription options (speech models, language detection, speaker labels), and receive a transcript object with the text and metadata. The SDK also provides utilities to export subtitles (SRT/VTT), extract sentences and paragraphs, and search for words within transcripts. Configuration defaults can be set globally or overridden per request.

Use it for:

• Transcribe recorded meetings, interviews, or podcasts with speaker identification and chapter detection.
• Build a real-time transcription feature for live calls or voice agent applications using the streaming transcriber.
• Extract and export subtitles from video or audio files in SRT or VTT format for accessibility.
• Analyze sentiment, detect language, and extract structured insights from audio content at scale.
• Integrate transcription into AI coding agents or chatbots that need current API context for audio processing.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Python SDK for transcribing and understanding audio using AssemblyAI's AI models, supporting prerecorded files, URLs, real-time streaming, and synchronous batch transcription.

Yes. The SDK is actively maintained, has low install friction, carries a permissive MIT license, and provides a straightforward interface to a production-grade transcription service. Choose it if you need to transcribe audio programmatically and are willing to use AssemblyAI's cloud API. The main prerequisite is an API key and associated costs.

Install

assemblyai on PyPI

pip install assemblyai

uv add assemblyai

poetry add assemblyai

Installing assemblyai

Before you install

Low install friction with standard dependencies. Active maintenance as of 2026-08-14 with recent release. Supports Python 3.8 through 3.14.

License in practice

MIT License permits commercial and private use with minimal restrictions—suitable for most projects.

Quickstart

pip install assemblyai

import assemblyai as aai

aai.settings.api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"
transcript = aai.Transcriber().transcribe("./audio.mp3")
print(transcript.text)

Requires an AssemblyAI API key (sign up at assemblyai.com/dashboard/signup).

Verify before relying

• Specific model names and capabilities beyond 'universal-3-5-pro' and 'universal-2' mentioned in examples
• Latency and throughput characteristics for different transcriber classes
• Audio format support and file size limits for each transcriber variant
• Cost and rate-limiting details for the API

Package facts

Evidence: assemblyai-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl

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