Amazon Transcribe
Don’t want to wire up the Amazon Transcribe API? Drop the file here.
The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free: a recording up to 20 minutes transcribes in full, a longer one is previewed, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, and credits never expire.
AWS managed speech-to-text with batch + streaming, custom vocabulary, and medical/call-analytics variants.
Best for teams already on AWS who want IAM-native STT and bundled features like channel ID and PII redaction. Pricing: from $0.0240/min (standard batch, tiered).
What it is
Amazon Transcribe is AWS's managed automatic speech recognition service. It offers batch transcription from S3, real-time streaming over WebSocket and HTTP/2, speaker diarization, channel identification, custom vocabulary, custom language models, and automatic content redaction. Dedicated variants exist for Medical (HIPAA-eligible) and Call Analytics (post-call + real-time analytics with sentiment and issue detection). Pricing is per-second with volume tiers; HIPAA eligibility requires a Business Associate Addendum. Models support 100+ language variants. Available in most AWS commercial regions; some features such as Call Analytics are restricted to a subset of regions.
Watch out for: Per-minute pricing rises with each add-on (PII, custom language model, content redaction); region-specific feature availability.
Install / use
aws transcribe start-transcription-job ...
What people actually do with Amazon Transcribe-style transcription
The tool is the means. These are the jobs — each one priced at published rates, each one wired up on its own page.
Features
| Speaker diarization | Yes |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | Yes |
| Languages supported | 100 |
| HIPAA eligible | Yes |
Amazon Transcribe vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Amazon Transcribe | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Transcription APIs | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | Not verified | $6–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · first 20 minutes free |
| Speaker identification | Not verified | Named in the summary, key quotes and chapters |
| Word timestamps | Not verified | Yes |
| Streaming | Not verified | No |
| Languages | 100 | 99 |
| Platforms | API | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to Amazon Transcribe
Frequently asked about Amazon Transcribe
How much does Amazon Transcribe cost?
Amazon Transcribe is a paid product — published pricing: from $0.0240/min (standard batch, tiered). Pricing changes; verify on the vendor's own page before budgeting.
What platforms does Amazon Transcribe support?
Amazon Transcribe is an API — you call it from whatever you build, on any platform with an HTTP client.
How do I get started with Amazon Transcribe?
Amazon Transcribe is used through its API: get a key from the vendor, then call it from your own code. There is no desktop app to install.
How many languages does Amazon Transcribe support?
Amazon Transcribe lists 100 languages. That is the Whisper-family multilingual set, so quality varies by language — English and the large European languages are strongest.
What are the limitations of Amazon Transcribe?
Per-minute pricing rises with each add-on (PII, custom language model, content redaction); region-specific feature availability.
Who is Amazon Transcribe best for?
Teams already on AWS who want IAM-native STT and bundled features like channel ID and PII redaction.
Is Amazon Transcribe open source?
No. Amazon Transcribe is a proprietary API from Amazon Web Services. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.
Who makes Amazon Transcribe?
Amazon Transcribe is made by Amazon Web Services.
What kind of tool is Amazon Transcribe?
In this directory Amazon Transcribe is filed under commercial api, hyperscaler as a API.
What are the alternatives to Amazon Transcribe?
There is a side-by-side page at /tools/aws-transcribe-alternatives comparing Amazon Transcribe with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.
Can I automate Amazon Transcribe-style transcription without running it myself?
Yes. If what you want is transcripts rather than the tool itself, Whipscribe does the same job as a hosted API: submit a file or URL, poll a job id, pull the result as txt, json, srt, vtt or docx. $0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. The automation recipes on this site show it wired to Drive folders, Zoom recordings, S3 buckets and no-code platforms.
How is Whipscribe different from Amazon Transcribe?
Amazon Transcribe is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training, and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export.
What does transcription cost if I use Whipscribe instead of Amazon Transcribe?
$0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $2.16, a thousand-hour archive is about $720 once. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, so you can see what your recording holds before paying anything.
Where is the Amazon Transcribe category heading?
Three things are moving across the whole speech-to-text market right now: summaries, action items and speaker insights generated on top of the transcript rather than sold separately; private, secured deployment where the audio never leaves a boundary you control; and agent access — transcription exposed as a tool that Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner can call directly. Whipscribe ships all three today: per-job insights, our own servers, and an MCP server.
Whipscribe is a hosted transcription service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.
Transcribe your recordings
Using Amazon Transcribe today? Send your next recording here and compare the transcript. Transcribe any language, any recording · Transcription services from $0.29 an hour · Transcribe from any meeting or recording platform · How to transcribe, step by step
Explore
All transcription tools · By language · By platform · By file format · How-to guides · Transcription services · Transcription API · Pricing
Have the recording already?
Skip the setup and send the file or the link: see MP3 to text for long recordings, a podcast episode as text from its link and the SRT generator.
Comparing tools before you pay?
If you would rather pay a service than run software yourself: see how the best transcription services compare, affordable transcription priced per hour and transcription services from $6.