Microsoft launches MAI-Transcribe-2, claiming the most accurate and cheapest speech recognition at $0.10/hour
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra126 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.565 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen156 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.795 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 65 days before it.
Key facts
- Released 2026-09-03; public preview in Azure Speech (Fast Transcription API, enhancedMode model MAI-Transcribe-2)
- 60 languages (up from 43 in MAI-Transcribe-1.5); code-switching, automatic language ID
- FLEURS: 5.2% average WER across 60 languages, 3.4% on the top 25 (Microsoft); #2 on Artificial Analysis WER leaderboard
- Speed: 1 hour of audio in ~10 s; ~10x faster than GPT-Transcribe, 7x than Scribe v2, 5x than Gemini 3.5 (Microsoft)
- New: speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, keyword biasing, verbatim/clean styles
- Price: $0.10/hour promo through end of 2026 (MAI-Transcribe-1.5 was $0.36/hour)
- Same day (2026-09-03) Microsoft also open-sourced VibeVoice-ASR-Streaming; Meta launched Muse Voice Transcribe
What happened
Three months after MAI-Transcribe-1.5 debuted at Build, Microsoft AI shipped its second-generation transcription model,
adding diarization and timestamps and expanding to 60 languages. It is available in Microsoft Foundry / Azure Speech,
the MAI Playground and OpenRouter (microsoft/mai-transcribe-2), and can also transcribe input audio in Azure Voice Live.
Why it matters
Speech-to-text prices collapsed in September 2026: MAI-Transcribe-2 ($0.10/hr promo), Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 ($0.10/hr batch, 2026-09-18) and Meta’s Muse Voice Transcribe ($0.18/hr, 2026-09-03) all undercut OpenAI’s GPT-Transcribe ($0.27/hr) and whisper-1 ($0.36/hr). Accuracy and speed claims are Microsoft’s own.
Sources
4 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 primary, 1 press
Primary
- Microsoft AI - MAI-Transcribe-2 is the fastest, most accurate and cheapest speech recognition modelmicrosoft.ai, official
- Microsoft Learn - MAI-Transcribe-2learn.microsoft.com, docs
- MAI-Transcribe-2 model card (PDF)microsoft.ai, paper
Press
- Neowin - MAI-Transcribe-2 beats OpenAI and Google at $0.10 per hourneowin.net, press
Changes
- Linked the Azure Realtime / Voice Live entry
- Filed