A million tokens, measured in
Spoken language runs ~150 words a minute, so a million tokens transcribes about 83 hours of talking — a hundred podcast episodes or three and a half days of speech.
1 bar = 1 hour of talking
≈ 83 hours of speech
hours of transcribed speech
People speak about 150 words per minute (~200 tokens/min), so a million tokens transcribes about 83 hours — three and a half days of non-stop talking.
basis: 150 words per minute
1 block = 1 episode
≈ 110 podcast episodes
45-minute episodes
At ~9,000 tokens per 45-minute episode transcript, a million tokens holds about 110 episodes — a full year of a weekly show, twice over.
basis: 45 min per episode, 150 wpm
1 bar = 2 songs
≈ 2,500 songs
songs’ worth of lyrics
Song lyrics average ~300 words (~400 tokens), so a million tokens is the lyrics to about 2,500 songs — over six days of continuous music.
basis: ~300 words per song
Audio reaches the model as transcribed text, so the token cost of speech is really the token cost of words spoken at roughly 150 per minute. Podcasts, call center recordings, and meeting transcripts all follow the same math. For teams building transcription and summarization pipelines, knowing that 83 hours of speech fits in a million tokens helps scope both the compute and the budget.
Everything on this page is exactly one million tokens. So the price of having a model read all of it is simply each model's per-million rate. Updated 2026-07-28.
| Model | Read all of it (input) |
|---|---|
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $5 |
| GPT-5.5 Pro | $30 |
| Claude Fable 5 | $10 |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.50 |
| GPT-5.5 | $5 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2 |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2 |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | $1.50 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | $1 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 |
| Gemini 3 Flash | $0.50 |
From $0.50 to $30 for the same million tokens. Try your own budget in the calculator →
Or start over with the full picture — scale, prices, and the budget calculator.