GPT-4o mini Transcribe
OpenAI's budget transcription model: GPT-4o-class speech-to-text at half the flagship price.
About
GPT-4o mini Transcribe was released in March 2025 alongside gpt-4o-transcribe as the lighter, faster, cheaper sibling. It runs through OpenAI's /audio/transcriptions endpoint with a 16K-token context window and 2K max output tokens, and OpenAI reports improved word error rate over the original Whisper models with robustness across noisy audio, accents and speaking speeds — provider-reported, with no independent reproduction found. Pricing is $1.25 per million input audio tokens and $5 per million output text tokens (about $0.003 per minute), aimed squarely at high-volume call-center and meeting transcription workloads.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
Provider-reported: improved WER over Whisper.
Independent: no third-party reproduction found — treat as provider-claimed.
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: model specs and pricing corroborated across OpenAI docs and multiple API catalogs (16K context, $1.25/$5 per 1M tokens). Strengths: OpenAI-maintained, cheap at scale, drop-in Whisper replacement. Docked for: (1) proprietary with no weights; (2) every accuracy claim is provider-run with no independent reproduction. License: proprietary (OpenAI API terms).
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 1.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Released March 2025 alongside gpt-4o-transcribe
- · $1.25/1M input audio tokens, $5/1M output (~$0.003/min); 16K context, 2K max output
- · OpenAI reports improved WER over Whisper (provider-run)
- · No independent benchmark reproduction found