Whisper 1 API
OpenAI
Speech to textTranscribes a recording into words
OpenAI’s hosted transcription endpoint. OpenAI does not say which version of Whisper it runs, so the accuracy measured for Whisper Large v3 is not a figure you can assume applies here — we hold no score of our own for it.
- Type
- Proprietary
- Price
- $0.006
List price · per minute of audio · OpenAI · source ↗
Our take
Written Aug 2, 2026Whisper 1 API is OpenAI's hosted speech-to-text service, available from both OpenAI and Azure at the same per-minute rate. It turns audio into written text, though we hold no measured data on how accurately or quickly it does so.
Use this when you need hosted speech-to-text from a major cloud provider and the per-minute cost fits your budget. It is a sensible default if you already run other services on Azure or OpenAI and want unified billing. Skip it if you need verified accuracy numbers, speed guarantees, or a confirmed language list — none of these are measured in our data.
The case for it
- Identical per-minute pricing across both major cloud providers, with no platform premium.
- Hosted only, so no hardware or deployment overhead — you send audio and receive text.
The case against it
- No verified performance data of any kind: accuracy, speed and language coverage are all unmeasured in our data.
- No measured quality on any audio condition — read-aloud, podcasts, accented speech and meetings are all unverified.
How good is it?
We hold no score for this model.
The Open ASR Leaderboard is where a model that turns speech into text gets measured, and Whisper 1 API is not on it — so we hold no accuracy figure for it, rather than a poor one.
Or rent it from someone else
Why this differs from the header. The strip above quotes OpenAI's own list price. This is the cheapest live offer at the widest standard context we hold, whoever is serving it — a reseller undercutting a lab is ordinary commerce, not an error.
- per minute of audio
- $0.006
- Context served
- —
- Throughput
- Not measured
| Provider | Price per minute of audio | Context | Throughput | Trains on prompts | Logs prompts | Zero retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure AI | $0.006 | not reported | not measured | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
| OpenAI | $0.006 | not reported | not measured | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
Across the 2 listings we hold: 0 say they do not train on prompts, 0 say they do and 2 do not say. 0 appear in the zero-retention registry we check; the rest are unknown to us rather than confirmed either way.
What each host's API supports
From the parameter list each endpoint publishes. Streaming is omitted: nothing we hold reports it, for any model.
- ✓
- Supported
- ✗
- Not supported
- Not published
- host gave no parameter list
| Provider | Tool calling | JSON output | Strict schema |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure AI | |||
| OpenAI |
Tool calling: 0 of 2 listings say yes, 2 publish no parameter list. JSON output: 0 of 2 listings say yes, 2 publish no parameter list. Strict schema: 0 of 2 listings say yes, 2 publish no parameter list.
When we formed this view
Dates behind this page
Prices last checked 6h ago
What we do not know about this model yet
- No board we watch has turned up a score, so we hold no quality figures at all.
- 2 of 2 listings publish no parameter list, so what their API accepts is unknown to us.
- Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
- 2 of 2 listings do not say whether they train on prompts.
- We hold no cached-input rate for any of its listings.
Licence and identifiers
What the licence allowsWe hold no licence record for this model. Inside are the identifiers you need to pull it — its Hugging Face repo where we have one, our slug and a machine-readable card.
Licence
Commercial API terms. We hold no licence record for this model, so there is nothing to summarise here.
Identifiers
- Modality record
- audio->text
- Catalogue slug
- openai-whisper-1