Photo: Rostislav Uzunov / Pexels
The new speech-recognition model costs 10 cents per hour of audio, a 72% price cut from Microsoft's own model released just five months ago
Microsoft AI just dropped its transcription price to a level that makes the technology almost too cheap to bother budgeting for. MAI-Transcribe-2, released Thursday, costs 10 cents per hour of audio, a 72% reduction from the $0.36 per hour the company charged when it shipped its first model in this line five months ago.
For an enterprise processing 100,000 hours of call-center audio annually, a modest volume for a large bank or telecom, the annual bill falls from $36,000 to $10,000.
A pricing war Microsoft wants to win #
MAI-Transcribe-1 launched on April 2, 2026, priced at $0.36 per hour and boasting roughly 50% lower GPU costs than leading alternatives. MAI-Transcribe-1.5 followed on June 2, 2026, with expanded language support jumping from 25 to 43 languages and a word error rate of approximately 2.4% on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard.
Now MAI-Transcribe-2 arrives with a price point that Microsoft says undercuts anything OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs currently sells.
Speed is the other headline number. MAI-Transcribe-1.5 could already transcribe an hour of audio in under 15 seconds, a pace roughly five times faster than some competing models from OpenAI and Google. Microsoft claims the new model is faster still, though the company positions it as an improvement across accuracy, speed, and cost simultaneously.
The Suleyman strategy takes shape #
MAI-Transcribe-2 is the latest product from the Microsoft AI division led by CEO Mustafa Suleyman. The broader play is becoming clearer with each release: Microsoft wants to own the full multimodal stack, combining transcription with voice synthesis and integrating both into the products enterprises already pay for.
The MAI models are wired into Microsoft Foundry and embedded across Copilot, Teams, GitHub, and Dynamics 365 Contact Centre. The enterprise applications are call-center transcription, meeting notes, video captioning, and accessibility tools.
For context, MAI-Transcribe-1.5 was listed at $6 per 1,000 minutes through Microsoft Foundry. The new 10-cent-per-hour pricing works out to roughly $1.67 per 1,000 minutes.
What this means for the competitive landscape #
OpenAI’s Whisper model has been a popular choice for transcription, and Google’s speech-to-text APIs serve a wide swath of enterprise customers. ElevenLabs has carved out a niche with high-quality voice AI. All three now face a competitor willing to sell a comparable or superior product at a fraction of the price, backed by the distribution muscle of Microsoft’s enterprise relationships.
The pricing pressure creates an awkward dynamic for OpenAI in particular. Microsoft remains OpenAI’s largest investor and cloud partner, yet the MAI division is building models that directly compete with OpenAI’s products.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our