Cartesia's newest streaming STT — lowest WER of any streaming model, native turn detection, and robust on alphanumerics like phone numbers, emails, and UUIDs. English only for now.
1 languages · benchmarked
Realtime Score
77.6
TTFW (P50)
1554 ms
Flicker
0.0%
Cadence
0.0/s
RTF
1.01×
Word Error Rate
14.85%
Character Error Rate
7.87%
Benchmarks Run
25
Rate
$0.0065
/min
Per-second billing. Bring your own provider key and pay your provider directly — a 5% routing fee applies (first 100 min/mo free).
Set up BYOKCost estimator
1 hour
$0.39
10 hours
$3.89
100 hours
$38.88
1,000 hours
$388.80
Billed per second of audio processed.
Model ID
cartesia/ink-2
Authenticate every request with your secret API key as a Bearer token. Issue a key from your dashboard.
This model also supports realtime streaming over WebSocket.
Use it with your agent
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or any agent with a shell. It installs the CLI and the OpenTranscription skill, then transcribes with this model.
Quickstart
Upload your audio, create a job with this model, then poll the job or set a webhook_url to be notified when it completes.
Key parameters
file_path
string
required
Storage path returned by the upload step.
model
string
required
The model to run this job on.
models
string[]
Ordered fallback chain: primary first, then backups tried in order if a provider fails.
language
string
ISO 639-1 language code. Omit to auto-detect.
webhook_url
string
HTTPS URL notified with the result when the job completes. Delivered events are signed (X-OT-Signature).
title
string
Display name for this job in the dashboard. Falls back to the file name.
Response
A completed job returns the transcript in the OpenTranscription Unified Schema (OTUS).
Webhooks — skip polling
We POST a signed event to your webhook_url when a job completes or fails; verify the X-OT-Signature (HMAC-SHA256, reject if older than 300 s) and dedupe on the event id, then fetch the full transcript via GET /api/v1/transcriptions/{id}.
Rate-limited per tier — see the X-RateLimit-* response headers.
Full API referenceSupported Languages
Supported Formats
Features
Limits
Max file size
No documented limit
Max duration
No documented limit
Ink-2 is a speech-to-text model from Cartesia. It supports 1 language and runs at $0.006/min — mid-range on price.
Its nearest benchmarked alternative is Soniox STT (Async). Best suited for live captioning and streaming transcription.