Microsoft MAI-Transcribe-1.5
B Tier · 7.9/10
Microsoft's in-house speech-recognition line. **MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming launched 2026-10-01 -- Microsoft's first real-time streaming transcription model, ranked No. 1 on Artificial Analysis for both final and partial transcripts, 60 languages with continuous language detection, first partial hypotheses just over 100 ms after audio arrives, at an introductory $0.54 per hour of audio through the end of 2026.** It sits beside the batch **MAI-Transcribe-2 (2026-09-03, $0.10 per hour)**, which superseded the 1.5 model this page was built on: diarization, configurable styles, word-level timestamps, No. 1 on FLEURS across 60 languages. Microsoft pairs the streaming model with the new MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for voice agents.
Score Breakdown
The Good and the Bad
What we like
- +#1 on FLEURS WER overall is a genuinely significant benchmark result -- beats Whisper-large-v3, ElevenLabs Scribe v2, OpenAI gpt-4o-transcribe, and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite per Microsoft's published comparisons. Expect third-party verification through Q2 2026
- +Handles noise, overlapping speech, and accented / code-switched audio noticeably better than Whisper in Microsoft's published evaluations -- the real-world robustness story matters more than the headline WER for meeting transcription and IVR workflows
- +Pricing at $0.36/hour of audio is competitive with Whisper-as-a-service pricing on most providers and substantially cheaper than ElevenLabs Scribe v2 for high-volume use cases
- +25 language support with #1 WER in 11 top languages means this is a real global product, not just an English-first model with a long tail of poorly-supported locales
What could be better
- −Competes with the raw-model tier (Whisper, gpt-4o-transcribe, Scribe v2, Gemini Flash-Lite) -- NOT with meeting apps like Otter, Fireflies, or Descript, which sit higher in the stack and would likely adopt MAI-Transcribe-1 as a backend option rather than compete with it. If you want a meeting UX, stay with your current app
- −Foundry-only at launch means you need an Azure account and engineering work. No consumer-facing UI. Otter.ai, Fireflies, and Descript remain the right answer for end-user transcription workflows
- −Microsoft's published benchmarks are self-reported. Independent FLEURS-leaderboard confirmation is still pending -- third-party verification typically lags announcement by 4-8 weeks
- −MAI Playground access is US-only during public preview. International evaluators must use the API
Pricing
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
Known Issues
- MAI-TRANSCRIBE-2-STREAMING -- MICROSOFT'S FIRST STREAMING ASR, NO. 1 ON ARTIFICIAL ANALYSIS FOR PARTIALS AND FINALS, $0.54 PER HOUR INTRO (2026-10-01, vendor-primary): Microsoft AI launched **MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming**, which 'delivers low-latency, real-time transcripts in 60 languages, all while supporting automatic, continuous language detection'. **Leaderboard claim, as a dated snapshot:** 'It ranks no. 1 for accuracy for both final and partial transcripts on Artificial Analysis', and on the accuracy-versus-latency evaluation Microsoft says it 'sit[s] on the Pareto frontier'. **Mechanics:** rather than waiting for the speaker to finish, it 'produces its first hypotheses (known as partials) in just over 100ms of receiving audio', revises them, and commits a stable transcript; Microsoft's internal evaluation says words appear 'in the transcript 2x faster than with our closest competitor' for dictation and subtitling, and voice agents 'can start reasoning or calling tools mid-sentence'. **Price: 'available at an introductory price of $0.54 per hour of audio through the end of the year'** -- a dated flip (post-2026 rate unstated) and 5.4x the batch MAI-Transcribe-2 rate of $0.10/hr recorded below. **Launched alongside MAI-Voice-2.1 ($22 per 1M characters, 23 languages / 26 locales, one voice across languages with a native accent) and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash ($15 per 1M characters, 45 s of audio at 150 ms end-to-end latency)**, which Microsoft positions as the other half of a voice-agent loop; a 'Chatter' demo in the MAI Playground shows them together. The voice models are on OpenRouter; the post's distribution list for all three was cut off in our extract, so Azure Foundry availability is assumed from the Transcribe-2 precedent rather than verified. Comparison for this page: Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0 is $0.10/$0.20 per hour (streaming), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe about $0.005/min ($0.30/hr) -- so $0.54/hr is a premium streaming price justified by the accuracy claim, not a price lead.Source: Microsoft AI (microsoft.ai/news/our-first-streaming-transcription-model/, JSON-LD datePublished 2026-10-01T16:00Z; listed first on microsoft.ai/blog/ via Firecrawl) -- fetched 2026-10-02 via curl with browser UA · 2026-10-01
- MAI-TRANSCRIBE-2 SUPERSEDES THIS MODEL -- AND THE PRICE IS THE HEADLINE, NOT THE ACCURACY (2026-09-03, vendor-primary): Microsoft launched **MAI-Transcribe-2**, calling it 'not only our most capable transcription model yet, but the most capable and efficient amongst our competitors'. **THE NUMBER THAT MATTERS: $0.10 per hour of audio**, which Microsoft calls 'the best price on the market'. **NEW CAPABILITIES OVER 1.5:** **diarization** (speaker separation), **configurable transcription styles**, and **word-level timestamps** -- the diarization addition is the significant one, because its absence is what pushed transcription buyers toward competitors regardless of raw WER. **ACCURACY, VENDOR-PUBLISHED:** ranks **first on the FLEURS benchmark across 60 languages with an average Word-Error-Rate of 5.2%**, defines the Pareto frontier for accuracy and latency on **Artificial Analysis**, and ranks **second on the Artificial Analysis WER leaderboard**. Microsoft names the models it says it beats: **Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, GPT-Transcribe, Whisper V3-Large and ScribeV2**. **READ THE TWO WER FIGURES CAREFULLY BEFORE COMPARING THEM TO THIS PAGE'S 1.5 NUMBERS -- THEY ARE DIFFERENT BENCHMARKS.** The 5.2% is a **60-language FLEURS average**; the 2.4% recorded on this page for MAI-Transcribe-1.5 is an **Artificial Analysis** figure. A higher headline number across sixty languages is not a regression against a narrower English-weighted benchmark, and Microsoft claims a rank improvement on Artificial Analysis (No. 3 for 1.5, No. 2 for 2) rather than a decline. **Language coverage also expands: 43 languages on 1.5, 60 evaluated on 2.** **STATUS OF THIS PAGE'S MODEL:** Microsoft's own model index now lists MAI-Transcribe-2 as the current transcription model; **no retirement date has been published for MAI-Transcribe-1.5**, so this page is not marking it deprecated -- but new deployments should be evaluated against 2, and the 1.5 integrations into Copilot, Teams, GitHub and Dynamics 365 Contact Center should be expected to migrate.Source: Microsoft AI (microsoft.ai/news/mai-transcribe-2-is-the-fastest-most-accurate-and-cheapest-speech-recognition-model-in-the-world/, JSON-LD datePublished 2026-09-03) -- fetched 2026-09-05 via curl with browser UA · 2026-09-03
- VERSION BUMP (2026-06-02, Microsoft Build): MAI-Transcribe-1.5 launched in the 'seven new MAI models' wave. Vendor-published changes vs 1.0: language coverage expanded from 25 to 43; speed improved to under 15 seconds per hour of audio (from 53s); new keyword-biasing feature delivers a ~30% WER reduction on the FLEURS multilingual benchmark by applying domain terminology intelligently (context-aware, not blind keyword forcing). Microsoft claims 'best-in-class Word Error Rate across 43 languages' and #3 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard at 2.4% WER, describing it as 'the fastest, most efficient and most cost-effective transcription model of any hyperscaler.' Now being integrated into Copilot, Teams, GitHub, and Dynamics 365 Contact Center; available through Foundry. Per-hour pricing not disclosed at launch.Source: Microsoft AI (microsoft.ai/news/mai-transcribe-1-5more-accurate-context-aware-and-built-for-production/, microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/) · 2026-06-02
- Public preview in US only for MAI Playground. Foundry API works globally but you need an Azure subscription to evaluateSource: Microsoft AI launch post · 2026-04
- Competitor positioning on the site: MAI-Transcribe-1 is a backend model, not a meeting-transcription product. Do not position it as an Otter.ai competitor -- it competes with Whisper and would typically be adopted BY meeting apps, not replace themSource: Microsoft model card + tech analysis · 2026-04
Best for
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.
Not for
End-user meeting transcription -- use Otter.ai, Fireflies, or Descript for that. Also not the right answer for on-device / edge transcription -- use Whisper-tiny or a compressed local model there. MAI-Transcribe-1 is a cloud-API tier-1 accuracy play.
Our Verdict
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.
Sources
- Microsoft AI: Our first streaming transcription model debuts at no. 1 on Artificial Analysis (2026-10-01) -- MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming $0.54/hr intro, MAI-Voice-2.1 $22/1M chars, Voice-2.1-Flash $15/1M chars (accessed 2026-10-02)
- Microsoft AI: MAI-Transcribe-2 (2026-09-03) -- $0.10/hr audio, FLEURS No. 1 across 60 languages at 5.2% WER, adds diarization and word-level timestamps (accessed 2026-09-05)
- Microsoft AI: MAI-Transcribe-1.5 -- more accurate, context-aware, built for production (2026-06-02) (accessed 2026-06-02)
- Microsoft AI: Launching seven new MAI models (2026-06-02) (accessed 2026-06-02)
- Microsoft AI: State-of-the-art speech recognition with MAI-Transcribe-1 (accessed 2026-04-17)
- Microsoft AI: 3 new MAI models in Foundry (accessed 2026-04-17)
- MAI-Transcribe-1 model card PDF (accessed 2026-04-17)
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