# IBM Watson Speech to Text vs Mistral Voxtral Transcribe (slim)

> Mistral Voxtral Transcribe scores 63.1 (B) to IBM Watson Speech to Text's 54.5 (C) for speech-to-text. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/ibm-watson-stt-vs-mistral-voxtral-transcribe.md (~4,900 tokens) · this version ~2,330 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/ibm-watson-stt-vs-mistral-voxtral-transcribe.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/ibm-watson-stt-vs-mistral-voxtral-transcribe
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe scores 63.1 (B) on agent readiness against IBM Watson Speech to Text's 54.5 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do speech-to-text.

- IBM Watson Speech to Text: C 54.5, rank #904 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/ibm-watson-stt.min.md
- Mistral Voxtral Transcribe: B 63.1, rank #526 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/mistral-voxtral-transcribe.min.md
- IBM Watson Speech to Text, good for Enterprises on IBM Cloud needing custom acoustic models, HIPAA on Premium and many locations. Also No incidents deducted, where Mistral Voxtral Transcribe loses 6 points for them.
- Mistral Voxtral Transcribe, 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 Reliability, 53 against 40; Schema & documentation, 85 against 55; Agent ergonomics, 77 against 66; Maintenance & community, 88 against 33. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.

| Category | IBM Watson Speech to Text | Mistral Voxtral Transcribe |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 40 | 53 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 55 | 85 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 66 | 77 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 68 | 70 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 33 | 88 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 80 | 83 |

| Fact (where they differ) | IBM Watson Speech to Text | Mistral Voxtral Transcribe |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | IBM | Mistral AI |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://api.mistral.ai/v1` |
| Licence | none | Proprietary hosted service under Mistral's commercial terms. Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime weights and the SDKs are Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 0 | none |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-06-29 | 2026-10-20 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2026-09-25 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-08-25 | 2026-09-03 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | yes, with an opt-out |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | none | 773 stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 4/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Maintenance & community, Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +55: 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.)
- Schema & documentation, Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +30: 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).)
- Reliability, Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +13: 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).)
- Agent ergonomics, Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +11: 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).)

| Task | IBM Watson Speech to Text | Mistral Voxtral Transcribe |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Transcribe a one-hour meeting | $0.60 to $1.20 | $0.18 to $0.48 |