OpenAI’s speech-to-text endpoint takes uploads of at most 25 MB, so an hour of audio has to be compressed or cut into chunks first, and you upload every file yourself. This tool takes links (any size), downloads and transcribes them with open-source Whisper, and returns text, timestamps and subtitles. The price per minute is in the same range as OpenAI’s whisper-1; OpenAI’s newer models are cheaper, so the reasons to switch are the workflow ones below, not price.
from apify_client import ApifyClient # pip install apify-client
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("fguiraud/audio-video-transcriber").call(run_input={
"sources": [
{
"url": "https://archive.org/download/gettysburg_johng_librivox/gettysburg_address_64kb.mp3"
}
],
"model": "small",
"outputs": [
"text",
"srt"
]
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
print(item["language"], item["durationSeconds"])
print(item["text"][:300])
No Python? Open the Actor page, paste your input in the form and press Start; results export to JSON, CSV or Excel.
Fields from a real run on 2026-09-30 (long values shortened):
{
"source": "https://github.com/openai/whisper/raw/main/tests/jfk.flac",
"status": "ok",
"model": "tiny",
"language": "en",
"durationSeconds": 11,
"billedMinutes": 1,
"text": "And so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country",
"srt": "1\n00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,900\nAnd so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country\n"
}
$0.006 per audio minute, rounded up per file. Speaker labels (podcast and video tools) add $0.003 per minute.
Is accuracy the same as OpenAI?
It is the same open-source Whisper family (tiny, base, small); small is the most accurate option here. OpenAI’s hosted models may do better on hard audio.
When should I stay with OpenAI?
For short files you already have locally, the cheapest OpenAI model costs less per minute.
Can an AI agent use it?
Yes. It is an MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fguiraud/audio-video-transcriber (listed in the official MCP registry), and there is an agent skill for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Field-name guesses such as url or urls are accepted.