Cartesia

Cartesia Ink Whisper

Cartesia’s streaming speech-recognition model — 90ms time-to-first-token for real-time voice agents.

#12released Oct 6, 2026·Proprietary·Not disclosed
audio64K ctx
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)
Coding (15)Mathematics (15)Hard Science (GPQA) (28)Agentic & Tool Use (68)Knowledge (MMLU) (45)Vision / Multimodal (88)

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 key
curl 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."}]
  }'

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
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Scores by Source

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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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}
}

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Add a live Podium Score badge to your GitHub or Hugging Face README — it links back to the live ranking.

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Cartesia Ink Whisper LLMPodium Score
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