Microsoft AI cut the price of its MAI-Transcribe-2 speech-to-text model to $0.10 per hour of audio, a 72% drop from its predecessor, and says independent benchmarks now put it ahead of OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on both speed and price.
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Microsoft AI just cut the price of automatic transcription by seventy two percent. MAI-Transcribe-2 now costs ten cents an hour of audio, down from thirty six cents. Microsoft says it's not just cheaper, it's faster too. Ten times faster than OpenAI's GPT-Transcribe, seven times faster than ElevenLabs' Scribe v2, five times faster than Google's Gemini transcribe model, per Artificial Analysis. It also now covers sixty languages, up from twenty five back in April. The model plugs straight into Copilot, Teams, GitHub, and Dynamics 365. This comes months after Microsoft restructured its partnership with OpenAI, winning the right to build advanced AI on its own. Cheaper transcription won't make headlines like a new reasoning model would, but it's exactly the workload Microsoft can now bring in house instead of paying OpenAI for it.