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How much does speech-to-text cost per hour? Comparing the xAI and Mistral APIs

2026/10/13

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].