Microsoft Priced Transcription at $0.10 an Hour, a 72% Cut From Its Own Model Five Months Ago

VentureBeat·high signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Microsoft AI shipped MAI-Transcribe-2 on September 3 in public preview through Azure Speech, ranking first on FLEURS across 60 languages at a 5.2% average word error rate and second on the independent Artificial Analysis WER leaderboard. It is priced at $0.10 per hour through December 31, 2026, down 72% from the $0.36 per hour of its predecessor five months ago, with the non-promotional rate undisclosed. Microsoft claims it is 10x faster than OpenAI's GPT-Transcribe, 7x faster than ElevenLabs Scribe v2 and 5x faster than Gemini 3, and it adds speaker diarization and word-level timestamps.