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

> Amazon Transcribe has a score of 73.6 (BB) against Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux)'s 70.6 (BB). Both do speech stt. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 45 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-04

Amazon Transcribe has a score of 73.6 (BB) against Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux)'s 70.6 (BB). Both do speech stt. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 45 points.

- Amazon Transcribe: grade BB, 73.6/100, rank #57 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/amazon-transcribe.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/amazon-transcribe.json
- Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux): grade BB, 70.6/100, rank #94 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/deepgram-stt.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/deepgram-stt.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Amazon Transcribe for reliability (+30), agent ergonomics (+5), security & auth (+15), transparency & trust (+10).

Pick Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) for schema & documentation (+5), payments & pricing (+20), maintenance & community (+45).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Amazon Transcribe | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 95 | 65 | Amazon Transcribe +30 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 90 | 95 | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) +5 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 75 | Amazon Transcribe +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 80 | 65 | Amazon Transcribe +15 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 20 | 40 | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 35 | 80 | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) +45 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 85 | 75 | Amazon Transcribe +10 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **73.6 · BB** | **70.6 · BB** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Amazon Transcribe | Deepgram Speech-to-Text (Nova-3, Flux) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model API | Model API |
| Vendor | Amazon Web Services | Deepgram |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://transcribe.us-east-1.amazonaws.com` | `https://api.deepgram.com/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio, SSE (legacy) |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (SDKs) | MIT (SDKs) |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-09-29 |
| Popularity | 185 stars, 506k npm/wk, 201k PyPI/wk | 468 stars, 1.1M npm/wk, 805k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | 3.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**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.

## Before you call either

### 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

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