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Amazon Transcribe

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amazon/transcribe · by Amazon · end-to-end-asr

Pricing — 1 offering(s)

Amazon Web Services

Standard transcription (first 250K min/month)

  • $0.024 / minute Historical 2018-04-01 → 2026-09-19

    Free tier 60 min/month for first 12 months (new accounts). Volume discounts at 250K+ and 1M+ minutes/month.

  • $0.006 / minute Current 2026-09-20 → present
    SCO-608 re-verification: real, substantial price drop from $0.024/min to $0.006/min (US East N. Virginia)…

    SCO-608 re-verification: real, substantial price drop from $0.024/min to $0.006/min (US East N. Virginia). The live page's "Batch transcription example" states this flatly ("Batch transcription is priced at $0.006 per minute") without the 250K/1M-minute volume breakpoints the old entry recorded — those bands may have been folded into this single flat rate, or may still exist behind the page's region-selector tabs (not directly inspected; the interactive pricing table renders per-region via a dropdown this check didn't click through). Worth a follow-up check if a customer at very high volume reports a different rate.

Real-time streaming

  • $0.024 / minute Historical 2018-04-01 → 2026-09-19
  • $0.01 / minute Current 2026-09-20 → present
    SCO-608 re-verification: real price drop from $0.024/min to $0.01/min (US East N. Virginia), per the live…

    SCO-608 re-verification: real price drop from $0.024/min to $0.01/min (US East N. Virginia), per the live page's own "Call transcription example" ("Streaming transcription is priced at $0.01 per minute"). Same volume-tier caveat as the standard-minutes tier above.

Showing the active price and any recorded history. Full pricing history is available via the paid API — see API docs.

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Capability profile

How Amazon Transcribe rates across core capability dimensions, with the task-level evidence behind each rating.

transcription accuracy Strong

Strong on general English; Custom Language Model training significantly improves domain-specific accuracy. Medical tier optimised for clinical vocabulary.

language support Strong

100+ languages with automatic language identification. Multi-language transcription identifies and transcribes multiple languages in a single audio file.

speaker diarisation Strong

Built-in speaker identification. Call Analytics feature adds turn-by-turn analysis with sentiment, issues, and interruption detection.

real time streaming Strong

WebSocket and HTTP/2 streaming API. Stable for production workloads; deep integration with AWS EventBridge and Lambda.

custom vocabulary Strong

Custom Vocabulary lists and Custom Language Model training both supported. Industry-specific vocabulary packages available (medical, legal, financial).

Benchmarks

Benchmark Score Config Source
WER (LibriSpeech) — Amazon does not publish LibriSpeech WER benchmarks. Internal benchmarks indicate competitive accuracy; independent comparisons suggest parity with Azure on clean English audio. —

Operator guidance

The best choice for AWS-native stacks with call centre analytics, medical transcription, or heavy PII redaction needs. At $0.024/min ($1.44/hr) it is the most expensive mainstream STT option — justified by the rich AWS ecosystem integration and Call Analytics feature. For cost, Universal-2 ($0.15/hr) is 10× cheaper. For latency, Deepgram Nova-3 is significantly faster. Volume pricing kicks in at 250K minutes/month.

Use cases

Limitations

Citations