Amazon Transcribe vs Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux)

Amazon Transcribe

$0.006 a minute batch and $0.01 streaming in US East, with diarisation, custom vocabulary and language ID included. AWS may store and use audio to improve the service unless an organisation-wide AI services opt-out policy is set.

Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux)

Flux streams with model-level end-of-turn detection, so a voice agent needs no separate VAD. Training on audio is the default and the opt-out is a per-request flag.

Amazon Transcribe

1. Give every job a unique TranscriptionJobName. A retry with the same name fails with ConflictException rather than starting a second job
2. Batch is a job. Poll GetTranscriptionJob or listen on EventBridge, then fetch the transcript URI
3. Set OutputBucketName, because job records are deleted after 90 days
4. Back off on LimitExceededException. It arrives as a 400, not a 429
5. Set the organisation's AI services opt-out policy before sending customer audio

Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux)

1. Add mip_opt_out=true to every request that carries customer audio
2. Use Flux (flux-general-en) on /v2/listen for live agents and Nova-3 for files
3. Back off exponentially on 429. The concurrency limit is per project
4. Pass callback for long files so the request doesn't hit the 10-minute processing timeout
5. Mint keys with an expiry for short-lived jobs