If you are searching for a European OpenRouter alternative that also supports audio transcriptions, cortects might be an alternative. Given the recent controversial developments at OpenAI, and as I was already on the search for European alternatives, I deleted my OpenAI account and switched to Cortects for the few places where I need an AI API. The UI and feature set still aren’t as polished as OpenRouter, but at least it has the audio transcription endpoint, which I use for a voice-to-text Telegram bot. For now, I mostly use the Mistral models.

I finally took a closer look at OpenRouter today, added some credits, and used it with the Kilo Code VS Code extension to vibe code (or at least guide the LLM to code) a bit on the wedding website I’m building for next year. I used the Grok Code Fast 1 model most of the time. Furthermore, I also switched this blog’s AI plugins to use Mistral Small 3.2 for summary generation and image caption generation.

I wish there would be a European alternative that is as simple and supports as many models as OpenRouter. Ideally, it would even support the audio transcription endpoint with models besides Whisper.

And I need to experiment with some other models for coding, as I don’t like it being from one of Elon’s companies. At work, I use GitHub Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4 or 4.5 most of the time.

But the AI world is moving fast; I guess it’s just a matter of time.

If you’re reading this, it seems that my GoBlog Telegram Bot (just another embedded plugin) is working!

This new bot probably has no real use, but it was a good experimental project to try and get a bit more familiar with the current state of GitHub Copilot, especially as we can now use it at work.

Probably the biggest use is for uploading photos from my phone. I can just send them as files and get a link back. But I can also send text and it publishes it. Even with frontmatter to configure parameters for the post.

Regarding Copilot: For whatever reason (maybe my adblocking DNS?) the VSCode extension keeps asking me to log in again, but still works for the non-chat features.

However, I am still a little worried that AI will make my work obsolete.

To reduce my dependence on USA-based products, I switched from using the OpenAI API to Scaleway’s Generative API for my blog. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s based on open-source models, hosted in Europe. 🇪🇺

It was straightforward to just add an option to change the REST endpoint in my GoBlog plugins, and then use Scaleway’s API for creating the post summaries and the image descriptions. For the post summaries, I am now using llama-3.3-70b-instruct, for the image descriptions pixtral-12b-2409.

Let’s hope that there will also be a model that supports audio transcriptions until April 2026, so I don’t have to renew the credits on the OpenAI API for my Telegram Voice-To-Text bot. 🤞