IBM Watson Speech

IBM Watson Speech to Text is IBM's speech recognition service, offered as a cloud API. IBM's own pricing page, read directly, lists three tiers without dollar prices. Lite includes 500 minutes of free speech recognition a month and 38 pre-trained speech models, with a Start for Free button. Plus includes unlimited minutes per month and 100 concurrent transcriptions, with a View Details link to a FAQ pricing page. Premium includes unlimited minutes and unlimited concurrent transcriptions with no price or call to action. The page has no monthly or annual labels and no AI add-on pricing, shows Start Free Trial links, and the site is active. So treat paid tiers as contact sales. An aggregator lists the Plus tier from $0.01 a minute, which I could not confirm, and a review about 2,300 days old lists older per-minute tiers.

I found no official 2026 notice that Watson Speech to Text is being deprecated or folded into watsonx. The closest item is a 2021 notice that Voice Agent with Watson was removed from the IBM Cloud catalog and its speech functions moved into Watson Assistant's phone integration, which is a different product. A 2026 comparison says watsonx Assistant is not deprecated but IBM's public agent strategy increasingly centres on watsonx Orchestrate, and the official watsonx.ai pricing page does not mention Speech to Text. Because the product's long-term roadmap is unclear, ask IBM about lifecycle commitments before building on it.

IBM Watson Speech to Text suits enterprises already on IBM Cloud that need speech recognition with customisation. Compare Azure AI Speech, Speechmatics and Deepgram. Browse the Speech & Transcription tools directory for more.

Enterprise speech recognition

Customisable models.

Call and media transcription

Concurrent jobs.

Is there a free tier?

Yes, Lite with 500 minutes a month.

Paid pricing?

Not shown; contact IBM.

Is it deprecated?

No notice found.

Concurrency?

100 on Plus, unlimited on Premium.