Scribe v2 vs GPT-4o Transcribe
ElevenLabs's Scribe v2 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
Scribe v2 is the cheaper option — roughly 1.6x less on a blended workload, and it suits widest language coverage with diarization. GPT-4o Transcribe justifies its premium when you need higher-accuracy managed transcription.
ElevenLabs • Scribe
$0.00 / $
/ audio min (input / output)
Transcription across 99 languages with speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, billed at $0.22 per audio hour. Worth knowing that ElevenLabs credits are shared across its products, so heavy text-to-speech use can eat into the same allowance your transcription draws from.
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 62% more expensive than Scribe v2 on input tokens.
Specification comparison
| Attribute | Scribe v2 | 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 | medium | medium |
| Open weights | No | No |
| API model ID | scribe-v2 | gpt-4o-transcribe |
| Status | stable | stable |
Scribe v2: Published as $0.22 per audio hour. Entity detection adds $0.07/hour and keyterm prompting $0.05/hour. A realtime variant runs $0.39/hour (~$0.0065/min) at roughly 150 ms latency.
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 Scribe v2 if…
- Multilingual transcription with speakers
- Subtitling with word timings
- Interview and research archives
- Pipelines already using ElevenLabs voices
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 Scribe v2 or GPT-4o Transcribe cheaper?
Scribe v2 is cheaper. On a blended 3:1 input-to-output workload it costs about 1.6x less than GPT-4o Transcribe.
Which has the larger context window, Scribe v2 or GPT-4o Transcribe?
Both accept up to — tokens, so context is not a differentiator here.
Should I use Scribe v2 or GPT-4o Transcribe?
Pick Scribe v2 for widest language coverage with diarization. Pick GPT-4o Transcribe for higher-accuracy managed transcription. If cost dominates the decision, Scribe v2 wins; if you need the capability ceiling, benchmark both on your own evals before committing.