Whisper
Whisper is worth evaluating for vision when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating vision
- Buyers comparing 1 tracked provider route
Do not use it for
- Strict JSON or tool-calling flows
- Family
- OpenAI Transcribe
- Released
- 2023-03-01
- Architecture
- Audio / Speech
- Specialization
- speech-recognition
- Openness
- Proprietary
- License
- ProprietaryCommercial use: conditional
- Weights
- Not released
- Code
- Unknown
- Training
- Pretrained
Cheapest of 1 route · OpenAI API
About
Whisper 1 is OpenAI's general-purpose speech recognition API model, based on Whisper large-v2, released March 2023. Supports multilingual transcription across 50+ languages, speech translation into English, and language identification. Priced at $0.006/min of audio (flat per-minute rate). Exposed via /v1/audio/transcriptions and /v1/audio/translations. For new applications, gpt-4o-transcribe offers better accuracy. API ID: whisper-1.
Top use-case fit
Vision
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare API pricing across 1 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI API | - | - | ServerlessPartial |
Available via routers & gateways(15)
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
OpenRouter
HybridUnified hybrid gateway to 400+ models from 60+ providers via a single OpenAI-compatible API, with optional auto-routing that selects the best model per prompt.
Portkey
GatewayProduction AI gateway routing to 1,600+ LLMs with failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and guardrails; Apache 2.0 core is fully self-hostable with the complete feature set.
AIRouter
RouterCommercial LLM router that analyzes incoming requests and routes to the optimal model for cost/quality/latency via a drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, with a privacy-preserving embedding mode that avoids sending prompt content.
Helicone
GatewayObservability-first AI gateway with routing, caching, rate limiting, and request tracing; Apache 2.0 open-source core with a managed hosted tier for logging and analytics.
Kong AI Gateway
GatewayMulti-LLM AI gateway built on Kong Gateway 3.x, adding semantic routing, load balancing, guardrails, and MCP traffic analytics as plugins over Kong's existing API management platform.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Vision
No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
API versions
whisper-1Cheapest of 1 route · OpenAI API