Nova-3 vs GPT-4o Transcribe
Deepgram's Nova-3 and OpenAI's GPT-4o Transcribe both target speech generation, but they price and behave differently. Here is the side-by-side.
Pricing checked against provider documentation on . How we verify
The short answer
Nova-3 is the cheaper option — roughly 1.4x less on a blended workload, and it suits real-time streaming transcription. GPT-4o Transcribe justifies its premium when you need higher-accuracy managed transcription.
Deepgram • Nova
$0.00 / $
/ audio min (input / output)
Built for streaming rather than batch, with the low latency and concurrency handling that live captioning and voice agents need. Deepgram also sells a managed Voice Agent API on top, which bundles the LLM and TTS legs and prices per conversation minute rather than per transcription minute.
OpenAI • GPT-4o Transcribe
$0.01 / $
/ audio min (input / output)
OpenAI's current transcription model and the practical replacement for the older Whisper endpoint, which remains available at the same price but is no longer the recommended path. Priced at twice the mini variant, which is worth it on difficult audio and wasted on clean recordings.
Input price
GPT-4o Transcribe is 40% more expensive than Nova-3 on input tokens.
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Nova-3 | GPT-4o Transcribe |
|---|---|---|
| Input (/ audio min) | $0.00 | $0.01 |
| Output (/ audio min) | — | — |
| Cached input | — | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Max output | — | — |
| Native reasoning | No | No |
| Knowledge cutoff | — | — |
| Relative latency | low | medium |
| Open weights | No | No |
| API model ID | nova-3 | gpt-4o-transcribe |
| Status | stable | stable |
Nova-3: Batch pay-as-you-go rate for the monolingual model. Streaming is higher and quoted between $0.0048 and $0.0077/min depending on plan and source; multilingual adds roughly 20%. Confirm your tier in the console.
GPT-4o Transcribe: Legacy whisper-1 costs the same. Live transcript streaming through the realtime endpoint is far pricier at roughly $0.017/min. Uploads are capped at 25 MB.
Choose Nova-3 if…
- Live captioning
- Voice agents and IVR
- Real-time meeting transcription
- Call-centre analytics
Choose GPT-4o Transcribe if…
- Noisy or accented audio
- Technical and domain vocabulary
- Transcripts used without human review
- Existing OpenAI-based pipelines
Frequently asked
Is Nova-3 or GPT-4o Transcribe cheaper?
Nova-3 is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 1.4x less than GPT-4o Transcribe.
Which has the larger context window, Nova-3 or GPT-4o Transcribe?
Both accept up to — tokens, so context is not a differentiator here.
Should I use Nova-3 or GPT-4o Transcribe?
Pick Nova-3 for real-time streaming transcription. Pick GPT-4o Transcribe for higher-accuracy managed transcription. If cost dominates the decision, Nova-3 wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.