Amazon Transcribe vs Speechmatics Speech-to-Text

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.

Speechmatics Speech-to-Text

Training is opt-in and real-time audio is not stored. Enhanced transcription costs $0.40 to $0.43 an hour.

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

Speechmatics Speech-to-Text

1. Set "model": "enhanced" explicitly. The default is standard
2. Use notifications instead of polling. Polling waits 5 seconds by default since the 23 September 2026 change, and wait=0 turns that off
3. Fetch batch transcripts within 7 days. After that the API returns 404 expired
4. Pass a fetch_data URL for files over 1 GB
5. Use /v2/agent with linden-1 for live agents instead of the plain realtime path