GoKawiilMicrosoft cuts MAI-Transcribe-2 pricing to 10 cents per hour, undercutting rivals
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model it says beats OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on speed, accuracy and cost, pricing it at 10 cents per audio hour—a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged for its first model just five months ago. The new version supports 60 languages, up from 43, and adds built-in speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, targeting noisy real-world business audio rather than clean recordings.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The pricing makes large-scale transcription essentially a non-issue for enterprises, potentially reshaping budgets for call centers, banks and telecoms that process massive audio volumes. It also signals Microsoft's broader push to build its own frontier AI models modality by modality, reducing reliance on OpenAI despite its $13 billion investment in that partnership.
- MAI-Transcribe-2 costs 10 cents per hour, a 72% drop from its predecessor's price five months ago.
- The model now supports 60 languages and includes speaker diarization and timestamps by default.
- Microsoft is increasingly building independent AI models to compete without depending on OpenAI.
Sony ICD-PX470 Voice Recorder — If cheap, fast AI transcription is suddenly a commodity, the bottleneck becomes clean audio capture i the Sony ICD-PX470 is a dead-simple handheld recorder for meetings, interviews and lectures. It saves standard MP3 files you can drop straight into any transcription service, and runs on AA batteries so it's ready whenever a conversation starts.
See Sony ICD-PX470 Voice Recorder on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: venturebeat.com, 2026-09-03
Published there as: “Microsoft AI’s MAI-Transcribe-2 undercuts OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on price and speed”
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