Amazon Transcribe vs CMU Sphinx
Amazon Transcribe
aws.amazon.comCMU Sphinx
cmusphinx.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Amazon Transcribe | CMU Sphinx |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.01/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Speech Recognition Software | 8.9 (#2) | 8.3 (#19) |
| Languages | Amazon Transcribe provides features across 100+ languages. | CMU Sphinx is language-independent, but recognition requires acoustic and language models; the site lists prebuilt models for languages including English, Chinese, French, Spanish, German, and Russian. |
| Purpose | Amazon Transcribe is a fully managed automatic speech recognition service that converts streaming and recorded speech to text. | CMU Sphinx is an open-source speech recognition toolkit for building speech applications. |
Plans
Amazon Transcribe
- Free tierFree
- Standard Batch$0.01 a month
- Standard Streaming$0.01 a month
- Standard pricingPrice not published
In their own words
Amazon Transcribe
Amazon Transcribe has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
CMU Sphinx
CMU Sphinx is a free, open-source toolkit for developers building speech applications. Its maintained components are PocketSphinx, a lightweight C speech recognizer library, and SphinxTrain, tools for acoustic model training. The toolkit is designed for efficient recognition on low-resource platforms, and its documented interfaces support keyword spotting, grammar and language-model searches, and word-level segmentation. Recognition requires acoustic and language models. The toolkit is language-independent, with prebuilt models listed for English, Chinese, French, Spanish, German and Russian. SphinxTrain supports adding a language through data collection and cleaning, model training and testing. Noise handling uses MFCC features, noise tracking and spectral subtraction. The BSD-like license permits commercial distribution. Possible applications include voice control, language learning, transcription, closed captioning, speech translation and voice search. Decoders require PCM input, so encoded audio must be converted before processing. The project documents a PocketSphinx Android library and demo, but cautions that its Android tutorial may no longer work with current tools. The homepage announces PocketSphinx 5.1.0.