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Amazon's newer voice model listens 12% cheaper — and writes 11 times dearer

Amazon never published a price comparison between its two speech-to-speech models, but the Bedrock price list does it for anyone who reads all four rates instead of the headline one. In the us-east-1 list dated 13 August 2026, Nova 2 Sonic charges $3.00 per million speech input tokens and $12.00 per million speech output, against $3.40 and $13.60 for the original Nova Sonic. That is a cut of 11.8% on both sides of the audio. The text rates moved the other way, and much harder. Text input went from $0.06 to $0.33 per million tokens — five and a half times more — and text output from $0.24 to $2.75, a rise of 11.5 times. Both models bill audio and text separately, so a session's bill depends on how the two mix. That mix has an arithmetic break-even. Moving to Nova 2 Sonic saves $1.60 per million speech output tokens and adds $2.51 per million text output tokens. The newer model is therefore cheaper only while text output stays below roughly 64% of speech output volume. A model that mostly talks stays cheap; one that also returns transcripts, tool calls and structured replies crosses the line. What this does not prove: we have not measured how either model actually splits its tokens in a real session, and Amazon publishes no such breakdown, so the 64% figure is a property of the price sheet, not a verdict on any application. Regional lists other than us-east-1 may differ, and both sets of rates can change without notice.