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CartesiaInk familyCurrentSpeech and audioReleased 9 Jul 2026

Cartesia Ink-2 (streaming STT)

Cartesia’s streaming speech-to-text built for voice agents; pairs with Sonic-3.6.

Model idink-2

PricePrice not published

Checked29 September 2026

Where it stands

44newer speech and audio models since its release

The 5 newest are listed. All speech and audio models

After it from Cartesia
Cartesia Sonic-3.627 Aug 2026
Weights
Closed weights; access is hosted only.

How to call it

2 ways to use Cartesia Ink-2 (streaming STT), with the model id each provider expects.

Providers, model ids, endpoints and docs for Cartesia Ink-2 (streaming STT)
ProviderModel idEndpointDocs
Cartesia API ink-2 wss://api.cartesia.ai/stt/websocket?model=ink-2 docs.cartesia.ai
Cartesia API (beta) ink-preview wss://api.cartesia.ai/stt/websocket

Pricing

Price not published.

No price source linked. Checked 29 September 2026.

Specs

Input
Audio
Output
Text
Context window
Not published
Max output
Not published
Open weights
No
Licence
Proprietary
Released
9 July 2026
Status
Current
Type
Speech and audio

What stands out

What its maker marketed at launch, and what people found later, each with its source.

  • Built-in semantic turn detection

    Emits turn.start / turn.update / turn.eager_end / turn.resume / turn.end events so agents need no separate VAD; 89% precision, 93% F1 on endpointing; ~0.1 s time-to-final-transcript.

    Source: cartesia.ai

  • #1 streaming WER on Artificial Analysis at launch

    3.4% WER on AA-AgentTalk, ranked #1 on Artificial Analysis’s streaming STT leaderboard (company claim, July 2026).

    Source: cartesia.ai

  • Keyterm prompting

    Found after launch

    Keyterm prompting and configurable turn detection added 2026-08-11.

    Source: cartesia.ai

Notes

Launched English-only (blog 2026-07-09); the current stable ink-2 snapshot is dated 2026-09-17 and supports English, French, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish. Query params: model, encoding, sample_rate, cartesia_version=2026-08-14; send finalize when user stops. Older model: ink-whisper (1 credit/s streaming). Ink-2 credit price not found on pricing page (plans list included STT hours).

Sources: https://docs.cartesia.ai/build-with-cartesia/stt/latest , https://docs.cartesia.ai/api-reference/stt/stt , https://www.cartesia.ai/blog/introducing-ink-2

Not yet checked against an official source: Some press dates an earlier Ink 2 release to May 2026 (unverified).