A weekly 30-minute solo podcast: 52 transcripts for the year

Transcribing a weekly 30-minute solo podcast for 52 episodes is 26 hours of audio, which costs $14.04 on MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming and $15.60 on Sume STT 1.0 in 156 ten-minute jobs.

A 30-minute episode is three Sume jobs, so the work is cutting the file, not the price.

The arithmetic

MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming is priced per hour, Sume STT 1.0 per audio minute, so the sums convert minutes to hours first. The Sume rate is the public rate on the Sume docs; confirm the live number in GET /v1/catalog.

Per minute, MAI works out to $0.009 ($0.54 / 60) against Sume's $0.01, so Sume is about 11 percent higher. On this run the difference is $1.56. Microsoft's rate is an introductory price that its page says runs through the end of the year, and the page does not say what the price becomes afterward, so a budget past December should not assume it.

Cutting an episode into three

Detach the audio of the video, then (with the audio imported as Sume-hosted media) split it at the pauses you want with Timeline audio split. Ranges are in seconds and each range becomes its own file, so 0 to 600, 600 to 1200 and 1200 to the end give three jobs.

Cut on a pause, not on the exact 10-minute mark, so no word is divided across two transcripts.

• Timeline audio is a flat $0.01 per job.
• Join the three transcripts in order and offset the second and third word timings by the start of each range.

Limits that shape a Sume run

Sume does not list MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, so the MAI row is a price reference. Sume STT 1.0 takes a public HTTPS audio_url and returns the transcript with word timings; there is no flag for timings because they always come back. Sentence segments are available when you send segmentation.

• duration_seconds is an optional hint from 1 to 600; leave it out and Sume reserves one minute, so send it for a long file.
• language_code is a hint such as en or ko; leave it out for auto-detect.
• diarize and tag_audio_events are fixed server-side, so do not send them; there are no speaker-label controls.
• The MAI price is an introductory rate that Microsoft says runs through the end of the year.

Running it

Submit with stt_create and an idempotency_key, wait with jobs_wait, then read jobs_result for the text and words. Cut recordings longer than 10 minutes at a pause first; audio detach pulls the track out of a video and Timeline audio split slices a Sume-hosted file into ranges.

The figures are list arithmetic as of 2026-10-08. A one-time check of your own audio is worth more than a benchmark, so run one representative file through each option before you commit a budget.