AI task costs · in pounds
What it costs to transcribe 100 hours of call recordings a month with AI
Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming Multilingual 0.6B is the cheapest of the 19 models priced, at 90p for 100 hours a month (0.9p per hour of audio). The dearest, Chirp 3, costs £72.36; the middle of the range is Muse Voice Transcribe 1.0 at £13.57.
How much does AI speech-to-text cost for call recordings? The answer below covers price only, not quality.
Prices of from OpenRouter's public API price list · converted at the ECB reference rate of ($1 = £0.7538) · Urbano DX
Cost by model, cheapest first
The workload
- One hour of recorded audio is 3,600 seconds, billed at the model's listed rate per second, minute or hour.
- 100 hours a month: about 6,000 calls of one minute, or 600 of ten minutes.
- Only speech-to-text models billed by audio time are listed. Speaker labels, word timings and other options can cost extra with some providers.
| Model | Per hour of audio | 100 hours a month | Rate used (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming Multilingual 0.6BNVIDIA | 0.9p | 90p | $0.01199 an hour, billed per second |
| Whisper Large V3 TurboOpenAI | 0.9p | 90p | $0.01199 an hour, billed per second |
| Qwen3 ASR 1.7BQwen | 2p | £2.04 | $0.027 an hour, billed per second |
| Whisper Large V3OpenAI | 2p | £2.04 | $0.027 an hour, billed per second |
| Voxtral Mini 3B 2507Mistral | 4.5p | £4.52 | $0.06 an hour, billed per second |
| Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3NVIDIA | 6.8p | £6.78 | $0.09 an hour, billed per second |
| MAI-Transcribe 2Microsoft | 7.5p | £7.54 | $0.10 an hour, billed per hour |
| Grok STT 1.0SpaceXAI | 7.5p | £7.54 | $0.10 an hour, billed per second |
| Scribe v2ElevenLabs | 8.3p | £8.29 | $0.11 an hour, billed per second |
| Muse Voice Transcribe 1.0Meta | 14p | £13.57 | $0.18 an hour, billed per second |
| Voxtral Mini TranscribeMistral | 14p | £13.57 | $0.18 an hour, billed per second |
| Voxtral Small 24B 2507 STTMistral | 14p | £13.57 | $0.18 an hour, billed per second |
| Nova-3Deepgram | 19p | £19.45 | $0.258 an hour, billed per second |
| GPT TranscribeOpenAI | 20p | £20.35 | $0.27 an hour, billed per second |
| MAI-Transcribe 1.5Microsoft | 27p | £27.14 | $0.36 an hour, billed per hour |
| Transcribe 1Fish Audio | 27p | £27.14 | $0.36 an hour, billed per second |
| Whisper 1OpenAI | 27p | £27.14 | $0.36 an hour, billed per second |
| Universal-3.5 ProAssemblyAI | 34p | £33.92 | $0.45 an hour, billed per second |
| Chirp 3Google | 72p | £72.36 | $0.96 an hour, billed per second |
How the numbers are worked out
- Each workload is written out on its page: tokens in and out, the share read from a prompt cache, audio minutes or images. Cost = workload × the model's listed rate, so you can check any figure with a calculator.
- Rates are OpenRouter's API prices in our snapshot of , the same ones on our model pricing pages. Buying from the developer directly can cost a little more or less. When rates move, the price change log records it.
- US dollars become pounds at the European Central Bank reference rate of : €1 = $1.1195 = £0.84385, so $1 = £0.7538. VAT, card fees and top-up fees are not included.
- About 0.75 English words make one token. Each model's tokenizer counts the same text a little differently, so treat a figure as a close estimate, not a quote.
- Models that reason before answering can add thinking tokens, billed as output. These figures count none, so a model with thinking switched on can cost more.
- This compares price only. It says nothing about which model does the job well: a cheap model that gets a tenth of the answers wrong can cost more in staff time than it saves.
Other tasks
- Summarise a 50-page PDF
- Draft replies to 1,000 customer emails
- Run a support chatbot: 10,000 chats a month
- Classify 10,000 support tickets
- Extract fields from 1,000 scanned invoices
- Write 500 product descriptions
- Translate a 20,000-word website
- Generate 100 marketing images
- Answer questions over 10,000 internal documents
Want this running on your own data, with the cost measured? See the fixed-price AI pilot