GPT Transcribe improves on its predecessor but can't catch ElevenLabs, Google, or Mistral on error rates

GPT Transcribe improves on its predecessor but can't catch ElevenLabs, Google, or Mistral on error rates Jonathan Kemper View the LinkedIn Profile of Jonathan Kemper Jul 29, 2026 OpenAI has released GPT Transcribe and GPT Live Transcribe, two new speech recognition models available through its API. GPT Transcribe handles pre-recorded audio files, processing them about 34 times faster than real time. GPT Live Transcribe is built for real-time streaming with low latency. According to Artificial Analysis, which runs the AA-WER benchmark, GPT Transcribe hits a word error rate of 3.31 percent. That's a 0.7 percentage point improvement over its year-old predecessor GPT-4o Transcribe. Pricing drops 25 percent at the same time, landing at $0.0045 per minute of audio. Both models accept text as transcription context, keywords, and multiple input languages. In the AA-WER ranking, OpenAI still sits behind several competitors. ElevenLabs Scribe v2 leads with a 2.3 percent error rate, followed by Google's Gemini 3 Pro at 2.9 percent and Mistral's Voxtral Small at 3 percent. Mistral recently undercut the market with Voxtral Transcribe V2, starting at just $0.003 per minute.Ad Full details are in OpenAI's Transcription Guide. The new transcription models complement OpenAI's recently announced Realtime model generation, which also includes the real-time transcription model GPT-Realtime-Whisper.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now Source: OpenAI Ask about this article… Search