Microsoft MAI-Transcribe-1.5 Pricing
All plans and pricing as of 2026-10-02
MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming (launched 2026-10-01)
- ✓Real-time streaming transcripts in 60 languages with automatic, continuous language detection
- ✓Ranked No. 1 for accuracy on both final and partial transcripts on Artificial Analysis (vendor claim, dated 2026-10-01)
- ✓First partial hypotheses in just over 100 ms of audio; revised as context arrives, then committed
- ✓Microsoft internal evaluation: words appear 2x faster than its closest competitor for dictation and subtitling
- ✓5.4x the per-hour price of the batch MAI-Transcribe-2 ($0.10/hr) -- the premium is for latency
MAI-Transcribe-1.5 (Azure Foundry, launched 2026-06-02)
- ✓43 supported languages (up from 25)
- ✓Best-in-class FLEURS WER; #3 on Artificial Analysis at 2.4% WER
- ✓Transcribes 1 hour of audio in under 15s (was 53s)
- ✓Keyword biasing: ~30% WER reduction on FLEURS for domain terms
- ✓Microsoft: 'most cost-effective transcription model of any hyperscaler'
MAI-Transcribe-1 (original, 2026-04-02)
- ✓25 supported languages
- ✓~3.8% average WER across FLEURS benchmark
- ✓2.5x faster than Azure Fast transcription
- ✓Reference price point for the 1.5 generation pending vendor disclosure
MAI Playground (Free preview)
- ✓US-only web playground for testing
- ✓Rate-limited preview
- ✓Evaluation only -- no commercial use
Is Microsoft MAI-Transcribe-1.5 Worth the Price?
Value Score: 9/10
Overall Score: 7.9/10 · Developers and enterprises who need best-in-class multilingual speech-to-text for high-volume use cases (meeting recording pipelines, call-center transcription, accessibility captioning at scale, multilingual audio indexing). Especially relevant for Azure shops already on Microsoft infrastructure.
MAI-Transcribe-1.5 (2026-06-02) widens the lead Microsoft opened in April. Going from 25 to 43 languages while pushing transcription speed to under 15 seconds per audio hour -- a 3.5x speedup -- and adding context-aware keyword biasing (a ~30% WER cut on domain terms) makes this a serious production backend, not just a benchmark flex. The #3 Artificial Analysis placement at 2.4% WER and the 'most cost-effective of any hyperscaler' framing position it as the default speech-to-text layer for Azure shops. It is now baked into Copilot, Teams, GitHub, and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, so most Microsoft customers get it without a separate integration. For consumer meeting transcription, Otter/Fireflies/Descript remain the right end-user products -- but their Whisper-based backends now have a faster, cheaper, more multilingual alternative to evaluate. Per-hour pricing for 1.5 is still undisclosed; that is the one open question.
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How Microsoft MAI-Transcribe-1.5 Pricing Compares
| Tool | Free Tier | Starting Price | Value Score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft MAI-Transcribe-1.5(this tool) | Yes | $0.54/per hour of audio -- introductory price through the end of 2026 | 9/10 | 7.9 |
| Fireflies.ai | Yes | $0 | 7.5/10 | 7.8 |
| Otter.ai | Yes | $0 | 7/10 | 7.5 |
| Notion AI | No | $10/month | 6/10 | 7.0 |