IBM Watson Speech to Text vs Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

IBM Watson Speech to Text 33

Read as a model. The newest release note is 29 June 2026 (parameter_set for large speech models), 130 days ago (10). No dated entries in the 90 days from 8 August (0). Release notes, IBM support and a public docs repository last changed 30 June 2026 (8 of 15). Official SDKs, ibm-watson 11.2.0 on PyPI (26 January 2026) and 12.2.0 on npm (January 2026) (10 of 15). CI not read (5 of 10). Total 33.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 88

Model reading. Mistral released three Voxtral 3 transcription models (Mini Transcribe 3, Small Transcribe 3 and Mini Transcribe Realtime 3) in Public Preview on 20 October 2026, 13 days before this check (30). The lifecycle policy promises six months' notice for GA models, and Transcribe 2 and Realtime 2602 were deprecated on 31 October with retirement on 30 April 2027, 181 days (12 of 12). No transcription model was retired in the 90 days to 2 November; Voxtral Mini Transcribe (2507) retired on 31 May 2026 (8 of 8). Six dated changelog entries from 31 August to 22 October, one of them the Voxtral 3 release, read as mistral-api reads the same changelog (10 of 15). The eight newest open issues on client-python had zero or one comment per the 8 October check (5 of 10). Official mistralai 3.7.0 (1 November) per the client-python RELEASES.md, and @mistralai/mistralai, with a v2 to v3 migration guide (15). Both are generated from the OpenAPI document, with test, lint and example workflows in the repository (8 of 10). 30+12+8+10+5+15+8 = 88.

IBM Watson Speech to Text 55

No public OpenAPI or other machine-readable definition was found (0). No llms.txt (0). The reference says which parameters each model family supports and the docs cover each feature (15 of 20). Typed parameters with defaults, ranges and enums (13 of 15). curl and SDK examples on every method, and errors with error, code, code_description and warnings, with invalid arguments reported as warnings (12 of 15). Versioned /v1 paths and dated release notes back to 2015 (15). Total 55.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 85

Model reading. The public OpenAPI document covers /v1/audio/transcriptions, its SSE streaming form and /v1/client/sessions. The realtime WebSocket messages are described by SDK types and guide examples, not by the document (22 of 25). llms.txt with Markdown twins of the speech-to-text, offline, realtime and client authentication pages (10). The guides say which model each endpoint runs, that timestamp_granularities and language cannot be combined and that realtime cannot diarise, and carry an OpenAI SDK compatibility table. In the OpenAPI document diarize, context_bias and temperature have no description (14 of 20). timestamp_granularities is an enum of segment and word, language is a two-letter pattern and context_bias items have a pattern, while model is a free string (12 of 15). curl, Python and TypeScript examples on each guide and a shared error glossary. The OpenAPI response example still names voxtral-mini-2507 (12 of 15). Dated model identifiers and a dated changelog (15).

IBM Watson Speech to Text 40

IBM Cloud has a status page at cloud.ibm.com/status, but it is drawn by script and showed no components or history to our reader, read as gemini-live's script-shell page was (10 of 20, and 5 for no readable history). Plus allows up to 100 concurrent transcription requests across WebSocket and HTTP (15). No 429 or backoff guidance was found in the API reference or the docs repository (0). No SLA was read for the service (0, unchecked). Next-generation and large speech models are GA, language by language (10). 10 + 5 + 15 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 40.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 53

Hosted reading. The docs point to status.mistral.ai, a Rootly page with component uptime bars per the 1 and 2 October reading on the other Mistral listings (20). The page has answered with a Cloudflare bot check since 8 October, robots.txt included on 2 November, so it is treated as blocked and the 90-day record for audio was not read (5, unread and not a finding against the vendor). The limits page names audio seconds a minute and audio seconds a month as the audio limits, with the numbers shown only in the Admin Panel, per the 8 October check (3 of 15). The error glossary tells callers to back off exponentially on 429, 500, 502, 503 and 504 and to read the Retry-After header, and the official SDKs retry with backoff. Transcription is a stateless call (15). No SLA found (0). Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and Realtime (2602) are deprecated but served until 30 April 2027, and voxtral-mini-latest still points to Transcribe 2, while the Voxtral 3 transcription models are Public Preview (10).

IBM Watson Speech to Text 66

API reading of the checklist. Timestamps, word confidence, alternatives and speaker labels are opt-in (15 of 25). Async jobs and custom models list, and async results can go to a callback URL (12 of 20). Structured errors and warnings an agent can act on (15 of 20). Async jobs take a user_token, results have a TTL, and jobs can be deleted, with no idempotency key (12 of 20). Most parameters are optional. Official SDKs including Python, Node and Swift, though the Python and Node SDKs last released in January 2026 (12 of 15). Total 66.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 77

API reading, as for the other speech-to-text listings. Segments, word timestamps and speaker labels are returned only when asked for, and the default response is the text, the language and usage. No subtitle or plain-text output format was found (18 of 25). There is no transcript store to page through. Volume goes through the batch API, which accepts /v1/audio/transcriptions (12 of 20). Errors return type, param and code with a fix per status in the glossary (17 of 20). The call is stateless and safe to retry, the SDKs retry with backoff, and no idempotency key exists or is needed (15 of 20). model is the only required field beside the audio source, and there are official Python and TypeScript SDKs plus OpenAI SDK compatibility for the batch endpoint (15).