Video inspect transcribe: per-minute STT add-on, 10-minute cap

How is the transcript on a Sume video inspect billed? Only transcribe: true bills, at $0.01 per audio minute of the duration_seconds hint you send. If you omit the hint, Sume reserves one minute, and the hint maximum is 600 seconds, so the transcript add-on tops out at $0.10.

This follows the Sume video inspect docs, which also say the add-on sits on top of the inspect's own compute reservation.

The rule in one line

The catalog entry for the transcript reads: per ceil of the audio minute of the hint, one minute when absent, maximum 10 minutes, frozen at the legacy STT 1.0 public rate. So the add-on is the number of minutes, rounded up, times $0.01. A 61-second hint is two minutes.

What the hint is and is not

The hint sizes the reservation. It is not a cut: the docs describe duration_seconds as a hint for usage, so send the true clip length rounded up rather than a guess. The video inspect page applies the 600 second maximum to the hint, so a longer clip needs a plan, for example detaching the audio and transcribing ranges separately.

The inspect itself reserves its compute ceiling and is captured at its own container seconds, never above the hold. The transcript's per-minute rate is added to that reservation, so budget the two lines separately.

Fields that only work with transcribe

Three fields apply only with transcribe: true: language_code, segmentation and duration_seconds. Sending any of them without it returns 400 video_inspect_transcribe_required, which is a cheap error to hit in testing.

language_code is a hint, and omitting it means auto-detect. segmentation.mode: "sentence" returns sentence segments shaped like caption lines.

Check for audio first

A clip with no audio track fails with inspect_source_has_no_audio. Run an inspect with frames: false first and read probe.has_audio; that is enough to know whether a transcript can succeed before you pay for one.

The route also defaults to sync mode, waits up to 30 seconds and answers 200 with the finished inspect, or 202 with a queued job to poll.

Budgeting a batch

Suppose you inspect 50 clips and send a 90 second hint for each. Each rounds up to two minutes, so the transcript add-on is 50 times $0.02, which is $1.00, plus the compute line for each inspect. If you leave the hint out, the reservation is one minute per clip, so check that a real clip of that length is covered before relying on it.

Send a hint that matches the clip. A hint that is too low under-reserves, and one that is too high holds more than you need for the duration of the job.

Where to confirm the price

Rates are catalog-driven, so confirm the live number with GET /v1/catalog, covered in the API reference, before you budget a large batch.