Amazon Transcribe

Use this skill when an agent needs to plan, run, review, or troubleshoot Amazon Transcribe as a speech-to-text provider inside an AWS-controlled workflow. Treat Amazon Transcribe as an AWS custody option first: it is strongest when the media already belongs in S3, the organization needs IAM/KMS/CloudTrail governance, captions must be generated from batch files, or real-time transcripts must flow through AWS streaming endpoints.

Do not use this skill as a generic "best transcription model" ranking. Compare accuracy, latency, cost, language coverage, and custody requirements against the actual job. For healthcare, call-center analytics, and sensitive audio, separate the general Transcribe path from the Medical and Call Analytics products before choosing.

Facts below were verified against AWS documentation on 2026-07-10 unless a line says otherwise.

Choose the right Amazon Transcribe surface

Documented fact: Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition service that converts audio to text. It can be used through asynchronous batch jobs for media files or real-time streaming for live audio. Sources: What is Amazon Transcribe, Streaming audio, StartTranscriptionJob API.

Use this decision map:

• Batch transcription: use for files in Amazon S3, offline transcripts, subtitles, captions, podcast/video backlogs, archives, QA review, and workflows that can wait for job completion. Batch requires the media file to be in S3 before StartTranscriptionJob.
• Streaming transcription: use for live captions, call assistants, meetings, voice input, or low-latency partial/final transcripts. Streaming uses bidirectional HTTP/2 or WebSockets and requires a language choice or language identification, media encoding, and sample rate. Source: StartStreamTranscription API.
• Call Analytics: use only when the media is a customer-agent or sales/support call and the desired output includes call-specific insights such as turn-based output, sentiment, interruptions, non-talk time, talk speed, categories, summaries, or action items. Do not use it as a generic captioning path. Sources: Call Analytics, post-call output.
• Medical: use only for medical-related speech such as clinician dictation, telemedicine, or clinician-patient conversations. Amazon Transcribe Medical is available for batch and streaming, is US English (en-US) only, and AWS says it is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment; patient-care uses require trained human review. Source: Amazon Transcribe Medical.