Microsoft AI launches MAI-Transcribe-2, undercutting rivals on price and speed

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 ...