How much does speech-to-text cost per hour? Comparing the xAI and Mistral APIs
xAI's transcription API, Speech to Text, costs $0.10 per hour of audio in batch and $0.20 per hour in streaming[1].
Mistral's Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 costs $0.003 per minute of audio[2]. That is $0.18 per hour, 1.8 times xAI's batch price and 90 percent of its streaming price[1,2].
For real-time transcription, Mistral has a separate model, Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime[3]. It was released on 4 February 2026, the same day as Mini Transcribe 2[3].
For text to speech, xAI's Text to Speech costs $15 per million characters[1]. Mistral's Voxtral TTS, released on 23 March 2026, costs $16 per million characters, $1 more than xAI[2,3].
Both text-to-speech services support voice cloning[3,4].