Best Speech-to-Text and Transcription Models

GPT-4o Mini Transcribe is OpenAI's smaller, cost-efficient speech-to-text model built on GPT-4o Mini audio capabilities. It's priced per token (input and output), making it suitable for high-volume transcription workflows that benefit from token-level billing transparency at a lower cost point.

GPT-4o Transcribe is OpenAI's high-quality speech-to-text model built on GPT-4o audio capabilities. It's priced per token (input and output), making it suitable for workflows that benefit from token-level billing transparency.

Voxtral Mini Transcribe is Mistral's speech-to-text model, derived from the Voxtral Mini family. It accepts audio input and returns transcribed text via the standard transcription API. Suited for transcribing meetings, voice notes, podcasts, and other spoken content.

Qwen3-ASR-Flash is Alibaba's automatic speech recognition service, built on the Qwen3-Omni foundation and trained on tens of millions of hours of multimodal speech data. The model handles 11 languages — including Chinese (with Cantonese, Sichuanese, Minnan, and Wu dialects), English, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Korean — with automatic language detection so no manual configuration is needed for mixed-language audio.

The model is designed for difficult acoustic conditions: it transcribes lyrics over background music, handles noisy and far-field recordings, filters silence and non-speech audio, and accepts arbitrary context text (names, jargon, domain terminology) to bias recognition toward specific vocabulary.

Chirp 3 is Google's latest multilingual speech-to-text model. It offers enhanced transcription accuracy across 24 GA languages and 77+ preview languages, with support for automatic language detection, automatic punctuation, and a built-in denoiser for cleaner audio processing.

Whisper Large V3 Turbo is an optimized version of OpenAI's Whisper Large V3 speech recognition model, designed for speed and cost efficiency. It supports transcription across 99+ languages with a 12% word error rate, and accepts common audio formats including mp3, mp4, wav, webm, flac, and ogg. Achieves real-time speed factors up to 216x, making it well-suited for latency-sensitive and high-throughput transcription workloads.

Whisper Large V3 is OpenAI's open-source automatic speech recognition model offering both audio transcription and translation. It supports 99+ languages and accepts common audio formats including mp3, mp4, wav, webm, flac, and ogg. With 1,550M parameters, it achieves a 10.3% word error rate and is well-suited for noise-robust, multilingual transcription in demanding conditions. Supports timestamp granularities at word and segment levels.

Whisper is OpenAI's open-source automatic speech recognition model, available via API as whisper-1. It supports transcription and translation across 50+ languages from audio files up to 25 MB. Accepts formats including mp3, mp4, wav, and webm. Priced per minute of audio duration, billed to the nearest second.