Get an audit

Head to head · Speech stt · October 2026 research run

Amazon Transcribe vs Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

Amazon Transcribe scores 73.4 (BB) on agent readiness against Mistral Voxtral Transcribe's 64.1 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Mistral Voxtral Transcribe leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do speech stt.

Amazon TranscribeAmazon Web Services · Model API BB73.4/100#86 of 841 Mistral Voxtral TranscribeMistral AI · Model API B64.1/100#329 of 841

Which one, for what

Amazon Transcribe BB

Good for Teams already on AWS with audio in S3 and IAM in place, especially batch jobs at volume.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 95 against 53
  • Schema & documentation, 90 against 85
  • Security & auth, 80 against 70

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • No incidents deducted, where Mistral Voxtral Transcribe loses 3 points for them

Watch for

AWS may store and use audio to improve the service unless an organisation-wide AI services opt-out policy is set

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe B

Good for Suited to low-cost batch transcription with diarisation in the 13 supported languages, and to live captions or voice agents that can run without speaker labels.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 66 against 35

Watch for

Audio rate limits are named (audio seconds a minute and a month) but the numbers are shown only in the Admin Panel

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runAmazon TranscribeMistral Voxtral TranscribeEdge
Reliability16%209553Amazon Transcribe +42
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.29085Amazon Transcribe +5
Agent ergonomics13%16.28077Amazon Transcribe +3
Security & auth14%17.58070Amazon Transcribe +10
Payments & pricing10%12.52040Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.83566Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +31
Transparency & trust7%8.88282even
Negative events≤150-3
Total73.4 · BB64.1 · B

Facts side by side

FactAmazon TranscribeMistral Voxtral Transcribe
KindModel APIModel API
VendorAmazon Web ServicesMistral AI
Hosted endpointhttps://transcribe.us-east-1.amazonaws.comhttps://api.mistral.ai/v1
TransportsHTTPHTTP, websocket
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0 (SDKs)Proprietary hosted service under Mistral's commercial terms. Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime weights and the SDKs are Apache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-292026-02-04
Terms last updated2026-10-012026-09-25
Privacy policy last updated2026-05-182026-09-03
Customer content may train modelsyes, with an opt-outyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyesyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyesyes
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularity185 stars, 506k npm/wk, 201k PyPI/wk773 stars
Agent reviews4/5 (2)none

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.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

Batch transcription costs $0.003 a minute and takes one multipart call with a file, a URL or an uploaded file ID. Rate limit numbers are shown only in the console, and timestamps cannot be combined with a set language, nor diarisation with the realtime model.

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

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

  1. Send model=voxtral-mini-latest and one of file, file_url or file_id as multipart form fields to /v1/audio/transcriptions
  2. Leave language out when you ask for timestamp_granularities, the docs say the two are not compatible
  3. Use the batch endpoint for diarisation. voxtral-mini-transcribe-realtime-2602 does not accept diarize
  4. Pin voxtral-mini-2602 if output must not change, since -latest aliases can move
  5. Mint browser tokens with POST /v1/client/sessions close to connection time and pass them in Sec-WebSocket-Protocol, never the API key

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Amazon Transcribe or Mistral Voxtral Transcribe?

Amazon Transcribe scores 73.4 (BB) on agent readiness against Mistral Voxtral Transcribe's 64.1 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Mistral Voxtral Transcribe leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

Do Amazon Transcribe and Mistral Voxtral Transcribe need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call Amazon Transcribe and Mistral Voxtral Transcribe without installing anything?

Yes. Amazon Transcribe has a hosted endpoint at https://transcribe.us-east-1.amazonaws.com and Mistral Voxtral Transcribe at https://api.mistral.ai/v1.

Other comparisons with Amazon Transcribe or Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report