Is Cohere Transcribe Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of huggingface.co plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-05-20

How to check right now

Known issues we've tracked

OWNERSHIP-CHANGE WATCH (2026-04-24): Cohere announced it is 'joining forces' with Aleph Alpha. Vendor blog (cohere.com/blog/cohere-alephalpha-join-forces) frames this as a merger / strategic combination rather than a clean acquisition, backed by Schwarz Group as lead investor with EUR 500M (USD 600M) Series E structured financing. STACKIT (Schwarz Digits' sovereign cloud) will serve as the 'technical backbone of this transatlantic AI initiative', targeting regulated sectors (public sector, finance, defense, energy, manufacturing, telecom, healthcare). Effective date / closing date not specified; deal announced as planned/pending. No immediate product or pricing changes for Cohere Transcribe customers, but a future combined-entity roadmap may reshape model lineup, support guarantees, and pricing -- worth tracking before any new long-term Cohere Model Vault commitment.
2026-04-24•Cohere blog: Cohere and Aleph Alpha join forces (cohere.com/blog/cohere-alephalpha-join-forces), TechCrunch, CNBC
No speaker diarization or word-level timestamps at launch. If your product needs multi-speaker separation (call centers, meetings) you'll need to add a diarization model on top or choose Grok STT / Deepgram / AssemblyAI
2026-03•Cohere Hugging Face blog
Model 'eagerly' transcribes non-speech audio -- prepend a VAD or noise gate for production use to avoid hallucinations on floor noise
2026-03•Cohere Labs limitations note
Only 14 languages supported -- narrower than Whisper Large v3 (99 languages) or Grok STT (25+). For rare-language workloads, open-source Whisper or proprietary APIs still win
2026-03•Cohere Labs model card

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Cohere Transcribe is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

GPT-Live (ChatGPT Voice)

8.6

**GPT-Live-1.1 and a smaller GPT-Live-1.1 Quip began rolling out in ChatGPT Voice on 2026-10-15, with more natural accents, shorter spoken cues while it searches, and new voices for French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Mexican Spanish plus an English voice called Bubbie.** OpenAI's full-duplex voice models (launched in ChatGPT 2026-07-08) -- listens and speaks at the same time, backchannels naturally, and delegates hard questions to a backend model while keeping the conversation going. **GPT-Live-1 reached the API on 2026-09-10 at $0.05 per minute** for the voice layer, with telephony support, keyword biasing, delegation to any backend model (GPT-6 Astra, Luna, or a third-party model) and a wider voice set. In ChatGPT: GPT-Live-1 for paid tiers, GPT-Live-1 mini for Free. **Five days after the API launch, Google priced Gemini 3.8 Live at $0.005/min audio in and $0.018/min audio out (2026-09-15)** -- a fraction of GPT-Live-1's $0.05/min voice layer, though each stack bills backend or text tokens on top

A

ElevenLabs

8.5

**Instant Soundtracks (2026-10-15) scores any uploaded video with original music and timed sound effects in ElevenCreative, ElevenMusic and the API, with effects on separate layers and the option to use the clip's existing audio as a style reference.** **ElevenAgents gained two new tools in the week of 2026-10-06: Architect (alpha, 10/06), a built-in expert that diagnoses agent failures from transcripts and drafts tested fixes, and synthetic voice detection (10/09), which flags AI callers in the first seconds of a call -- enterprise-only for now. ElevenCreative added Brand Kit (10/09).** **Two days after the v4 launch, ElevenLabs closed a $300M employee tender at a $22B valuation (2026-09-30), double its February Series D, with enterprise now 55% of revenue -- and the pricing page is running v4 launch promos (extra v4 credits on Creator plans and above, see the Oct 2 note).** **Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo launched 2026-09-28 -- a fourth-generation voice model on an entirely new architecture**, ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis' Provider Voice Arena and preferred by ~75% of listeners in blind head-to-head tests against Cartesia Sonic 3.6, Inworld TTS-2 and Google's Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS; v4 Turbo answers with a ~100ms median inference latency (~150ms to first speech over WebSocket) and is co-optimized with ElevenAgents. Both cover 90+ languages, follow inline audio tags like [laughs] or [phone buzzing] more accurately, clone voices with better speaker similarity, and are live now in ElevenAgents, ElevenCreative and the API (Text to Dialogue). Eleven v3 becomes the previous generation. The 2026-09-10 Universal Music Group licensing deal and CLI v1 (8/24) still stand.

A

Descript

8.5

Edit audio and video by editing text -- the 'Google Docs of media editing' actually lives up to the hype

A

Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)

8.1

**Grok Voice 3.0, xAI's new speech-to-speech model, shipped 2026-10-14 at the same $0.08 per minute as 2.0, which xAI's rate card now flags as on its way out; grok-voice-latest switched over automatically, and xAI cites a #1 score of 86.9 on Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Index.** xAI's standalone voice APIs. **Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 shipped 2026-09-18** -- xAI calls it twice as accurate as 1.0 at the same $0.10/hr batch and $0.20/hr streaming, ranks it first for accuracy among 32 streaming models on Artificial Analysis, and has already made it the default STT model; **1.0 is being retired in the coming weeks, so pin grok-voice-transcribe-1.0 if you need it**. **PRICE CORRECTION: text-to-speech is $15.00 per 1M characters on xAI's live rate card (verified 2026-09-21), not the $4.20 this page carried since April.** Speech-to-speech agent $0.08/min, 26 flagship voices, ~1-minute voice cloning, no-code Voice Agent Builder

B

Microsoft MAI-Voice-2

7.3

Microsoft's in-house expressive TTS line. **MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash launched 2026-10-01: 23 languages and 26 locales with one voice that keeps the same speaker and a native accent across languages, voice cloning from a few seconds of reference audio with consent guardrails, priced at $22 per 1M characters for 2.1 and $15 per 1M characters for Flash, which generates 45 seconds of audio at 150 ms end-to-end latency and is pitched at voice agents alongside MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming.** These supersede **MAI-Voice-2 (Build, 2026-06-02)**: 15 languages, emotion tags, zero-shot cloning from a 5-60 s clip, preferred over MAI-Voice-1 72% of the time. Microsoft also shipped a MAI-Voice-2-Flash and MAI-Image-2.5-Pro in July that this page had not recorded -- see the Oct 2 note.

About Cohere Transcribe

Tier A (8.0/10). Cohere's first audio model -- launched 2026-03-26 under Apache 2.0, 2B parameters, #1 on Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard (5.42 avg WER), 14 enterprise-critical languages. Free API with rate limits; Model Vault for production