Cartesia
Cartesia Ink Whisper
Cartesia’s streaming speech-recognition model — 90ms time-to-first-token for real-time voice agents.
Intelligence
91.8 #12
AAQI 92.0
Output Speed
260 t/s
ITL 3.8 ms/tok
Blended price (3:1)
$0.008 /1M
In $0.006/M · Out $0.012/M
Context
64K
≈ 160 A4 pages · max out 8,192
Quality Domain Radar
6-Axis Frontier Evaluation vs Category Average & Flagship
Cartesia Ink Whisper
Claude Mythos Preview (#1)
Average (68)
Radar axes are approximated from category scores where direct benchmark measurements are missing — see Methodology.
Strengths & Trade-offs
Where it wins
- Fastest streaming STT — 90ms TTFT
- 260× realtime-factor transcription
- Cheapest per-minute tier among premium STT
Trade-offs to watch
- Accuracy dips on heavy accents vs. Scribe
- Smaller language coverage than ElevenLabs
- STT only
Killer Use Cases
Barge-in voice agents
Instant partials let agents interrupt naturally.
Live captioning
Sub-second captions for calls and streams.
Telephony analytics
Realtime intent extraction on 8kHz audio.
Developer Quickstart & API
Set
CARTESIA_API_KEY first — get an API keycurl https://api.cartesia.ai/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $CARTESIA_API_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "ink-whisper",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this function for O(n) time and explain the change."}]
}'import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://api.cartesia.ai/v1",
api_key=os.environ["CARTESIA_API_KEY"],
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="ink-whisper",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this function for O(n) time and explain the change."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)const res = await fetch("https://api.cartesia.ai/v1/chat/completions", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.CARTESIA_API_KEY}`,
"content-type": "application/json",
},
body: JSON.stringify({
model: "ink-whisper",
messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Refactor this function for O(n) time and explain the change." }],
}),
});
console.log((await res.json()).choices[0].message.content);Official Resources & Links
API deployment
Compare hosts & latency
Throughput, TTFT and cache pricing across Groq, Cerebras, Together, DeepInfra, Fireworks, Bedrock and Azure.
GroqCerebrasTogether AIDeepInfraFireworks AIAWS BedrockAzure AI
Scores by Source
Category Scores
Benchmark Results
Head-to-head Live Matchups
Live Specs & Architecture
Under the hood
Ink Whisper — state-space streaming STT
- State-space architecture — linear-time streaming decode
- 90ms time-to-first-transcript-token
- Endpointing tuned for conversational turn-taking
- On-device-friendly distilled variants
Release date
Oct 6, 2026
Architecture
Ink Whisper — state-space streaming STT
Parameters
Not disclosed
License
Proprietary
Context Window
64,000 tokens
Max Output
8,192 tokens
Modalities
audio
Cache Pricing
read $0.002 · write $0.008 /1M
Reasoning
—
Input Price
$0.006/M
Output Price
$0.012/M
Output Speed
260 t/s
Time to First Token
—
Data Updated
Oct 22, 2026
Estimated monthly bill
Estimated monthly spend
$0.00
Calculating savings vs GPT-4o...
Cite & embed
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Loading badge markdown...BibTeX
@misc{llmpodium2026cartesiainkwhisper,
title = {Benchmark Analysis and Intelligence Evaluation of Cartesia Ink Whisper},
author = {LLMPodium Research},
year = {2026},
url = {https://llmpodium.com/models/cartesia-ink-whisper}
}Embed Score Badge
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