Gemini 3.5 Transcribe

Overview

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe is a speech-to-text model for recorded audio, not a chat model and not a live streaming session. On Kyma it is served through the same OpenAI-compatible transcription endpoint as the other STT SKUs: multipart file or JSON audio_url, response { text, language?, duration? } with json or text — it does not return per-segment timestamps. It accepts up to about an hour of audio per request. Billing is per minute of audio (one-minute minimum, rounded up), not per token. The transcribe alias is unchanged and still resolves to whisper-v3-turbo; this SKU is opt-in by id. This is file transcription only. It does not replace audio-scene understanding (audio-understand) and it is not the live streaming companion.

Specs

Field	Value
Model ID	`gemini-3.5-transcribe`
Best for	File transcription, multilingual dictation, captions
Context window	3,600
Input modalities	Audio
Output modalities	Text
Speed	Fast
Cost band	Balanced
Release stage	Stable

Pricing

	Price
Per minute of audio	$0.00675

Billed per minute of audio. Every request reports its exact cost in usage.cost; the full media price list is on Pricing.

Use this when

Meeting and call transcripts — Turn recorded meetings and call logs into plain text for search and notes.
Multilingual dictation — Transcribe speech across many languages without swapping SKUs.
Captions from a file — Produce a transcript from an uploaded clip, then format it client-side.
Voice-agent offline pass — Batch-transcribe recorded user audio before a later language-model step.

Not ideal for

Do not use this for live bidirectional speech or for audio-scene questions (tone, music, SFX). Those are different endpoints. It returns a plain transcript with no per-segment timestamps: verbose_json, srt and vtt are refused on this SKU (400 segments_unsupported) — use whisper-v3-turbo for timestamps.

Pick something else when

You want the default cheap and fast alias: use whisper-v3-turbo.
You need premium conversational accuracy and opted into the quality alias: use gpt-4o-mini-transcribe-2025-12-15.

Example

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://kymaapi.com/v1", api_key="kyma-...")

response = client.audio.transcriptions.create(
    model="gemini-3.5-transcribe",
    file=open("audio.wav", "rb"),
)

Agent query example

Ask the API which models fit, instead of hardcoding an id:

curl "https://kymaapi.com/v1/models?recommended_for=transcribe-audio&quality_tier=frontier-open"

FAQ

Does the transcribe alias point here? No. transcribe still resolves to whisper-v3-turbo. Pin gemini-3.5-transcribe when you want this model. How is this billed? Per minute of audio, rounded up, with a one-minute minimum. The generated Pricing table on this page is the live rate. Is this a chat completions model? No. Send audio to POST /v1/audio/transcriptions. A chat request is the wrong surface.

​Overview

​Specs

​Pricing

​Use this when

​Not ideal for

​Pick something else when

​Example

​Agent query example

​FAQ