Microsoft has cut the price of AI-powered speech transcription by 72 percent with the launch of MAI-Transcribe-2, a new model from its in-house Microsoft AI unit that the company says beats OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs on both accuracy and speed. The model, launched on September 3, 2026, is priced at just $0.10 per audio hour through December 31, 2026 — a steep drop from the $0.36 per hour Microsoft charged for its previous MAI-Transcribe-1.5 model in June.
The move is the clearest sign yet that Mustafa Suleyman's Microsoft AI division, built around the team Microsoft hired from Inflection AI in March 2024, intends to compete directly with the partners and rivals it once relied on. एआई एपीआई के तेजी से बदलते अर्थशास्त्र पर नज़र रखने वाले डेवलपर्स के लिए, एआई बज़ वायर लॉन्च होने वाले हर प्रमुख एआई टूल को कवर करता है।
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कीमत में कटौती के पीछे के नंबर
According to Microsoft's launch post and benchmark coverage from VentureBeat, MAI-Transcribe-2 ranks first on the FLEURS multilingual benchmark across 60 languages, with an average word error rate of 5.2 percent. On Artificial Analysis's independent non-streaming leaderboard, the model posts a 2.0 percent word error rate and ranks second overall for accuracy, behind only Alibaba's Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview.
गति वह जगह है जहां माइक्रोसॉफ्ट दावा करता है कि अंतर वास्तव में खुलता है। Based on Artificial Analysis evaluations, the company says MAI-Transcribe-2 runs 10 times faster than OpenAI's GPT-Transcribe, 7 times faster than ElevenLabs' Scribe v2, and 5 times faster than Google's Gemini 3.5 Transcribe. Artificial Analysis currently lists the model with a median speed factor of 410.7, meaning an hour of audio can come back transcribed in roughly nine to ten seconds.
मॉडल क्या कर सकता है
कच्ची गति और कीमत से परे, फीचर सूची का उद्देश्य डेमो के बजाय उत्पादन कार्यभार है। Available through Microsoft Foundry, the MAI Playground, and OpenRouter, MAI-Transcribe-2 supports automatic language identification, code-switching between languages mid-sentence, speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, keyword biasing, and configurable transcript styles.
Those features decide whether a transcript is actually usable in the settings where transcription earns money: call centers routing customer complaints, clinics documenting visits, newsrooms processing interviews, and meeting rooms where multiple people talk over each other. Keyword biasing in particular lets developers teach the model domain-specific vocabulary — drug names, product SKUs, legal terms — without retraining anything.
सुलेमान की दुकान से एक सोची समझी रणनीति
MAI-Transcribe-2 तीन महीनों में Microsoft AI का दूसरा ट्रांसक्रिप्शन मॉडल है। MAI-Transcribe-1 launched at $0.36 per hour, and MAI-Transcribe-1.5 followed in June with support for 43 languages and a third-place ranking on Artificial Analysis. नया मॉडल दो-तिहाई से अधिक कीमत कम करते हुए 60 भाषाओं तक कवरेज बढ़ाता है।
यूनिट ने हाल ही में साइबर सुरक्षा और छवि मॉडल के साथ-साथ टेक्स्ट के लिए MAI-1 और भाषण निर्माण के लिए MAI-वॉयस-1 भेजा है। What is conspicuously absent from the launch is any mention of Copilot or OpenAI — notable given Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and its history of routing AI features through that partnership. इसके बजाय, Microsoft एक Microsoft-ब्रांडेड मॉडल बेच रहा है जो OpenAI के स्वयं के ट्रांसक्रिप्शन उत्पाद के साथ आमने-सामने प्रतिस्पर्धा करता है।
भाषण एआई में एक मूल्य युद्ध
The transcription market has quietly become one of the most competitive corners of applied AI, and the pricing pressure is real: Microsoft notes the $0.10 promotional rate expires on December 31, 2026, which functions as both a customer incentive and a warning to competitors about where prices are headed.
अंतरिक्ष में स्टार्टअप के लिए, गणित क्रूर है। If a hyperscaler can deliver top-tier accuracy at a tenth of a dollar per audio hour while turning around an hour of audio in seconds, venture-backed transcription vendors must find value in vertical specialization, workflow integration, or privacy guarantees — or get compressed out of the market entirely.
For buyers, meanwhile, the message is simpler than it has been in years: state-of-the-art speech recognition now costs less than a dime an hour, and it is only getting cheaper.
एआई से आगे रहें
हर हफ्ते नए एआई टूल लॉन्च होते हैं, और विजेता और हारने वाले तेजी से बदलते हैं। एआई उपकरण बाजार के स्वतंत्र कवरेज के लिए एआई बज़ वायर का अनुसरण करें।
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