Transcription costs ~$0.02 per call, and a Whisper second pass catches errors live ASR misses
Kindly-Duty272 · reddit · 2026-10-12
Arguing that per-minute ASR pricing is the wrong lens, the author ran Whisper over a batch of recorded calls and found transcription costs about $0.02 per call—negligible next to voice engine costs and latency tuning.
An accuracy bonus: on one call, realtime ASR clipped "five fifty" to "fifty," while a Whisper pass over the recording recovered the full $5.50—so a second offline pass isn't just about cost, it catches errors.
The author asks practitioners at what call volume $0.02/call starts mattering, whether anyone switches ASR models purely to save here, or if it's always dwarfed by TTS and LLM costs—wanting real pipeline numbers, not theoretical math.
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