Microsoft Slashes AI Transcription Price to 10 Cents an Hour, Targeting OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs

Microsoft AI released a new speech-recognition model on Thursday, September 3, and priced it low enough to make transcription almost an afterthought on an enterprise budget sheet.

MAI-Transcribe-2 costs 10 cents per hour of audio. That's a 72% cut from the $0.36-per-hour price Microsoft charged for MAI-Transcribe-1, which launched April 2, 2026, according to Crypto Briefing. For a bank or telecom running 100,000 hours of call-center audio a year, a modest volume by industry standards, the annual bill drops from $36,000 to $10,000.

Microsoft says the new model beats anything currently sold by OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs on price, speed, and accuracy, according to VentureBeat. Those are Microsoft's own claims. No independent benchmark for MAI-Transcribe-2 specifically appears in either report. The prior version, MAI-Transcribe-1.5, did post a roughly 2.4% word error rate on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, an independent test, according to Crypto Briefing, and Microsoft says the new model builds on that.

New Features

Language coverage jumped to 60, up from 43 in June's MAI-Transcribe-1.5 and 25 in the original April release, according to VentureBeat. That's real progress, and it's not just a bigger number for its own sake.

The more consequential upgrades are the features Microsoft bundled into the base price instead of charging extra for them, which specialty vendors have historically done. Speaker diarization sorts out who said what in a multi-person recording. Word-level timestamps let developers search and edit down to the exact moment a word was spoken. Keyword biasing lets a company feed the model a list of drug names or product codes so it stops butchering jargon.

Two features are aimed squarely at industries with specific compliance and demographic needs. A "verbatim" output mode keeps every stutter and false start for legal and compliance teams, while a "clean" mode strips filler words for readable notes. Code switching handles conversations that flip languages mid-sentence, with Microsoft explicitly naming Hinglish and Spanglish as targets, a direct nod to Indian and U.S. Hispanic customer-service markets, according to VentureBeat.

Microsoft vs. OpenAI

Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and remains its largest single investor and cloud partner. Yet the MAI division, led by CEO Mustafa Suleyman, is now shipping a transcription model that directly competes with OpenAI's Whisper, according to Crypto Briefing.

This isn't a one-off. Microsoft launched MAI-Transcribe-1 in April, MAI-Transcribe-1.5 in June, and now MAI-Transcribe-2 in September, roughly a release every two months. The strategy is building frontier-class models one modality at a time and swapping them into products that used to run on OpenAI's technology. Transcription is where that swap has moved fastest.

The models are already wired into Microsoft Foundry, the company's developer marketplace, and into Copilot, Teams, GitHub, and Dynamics 365 Contact Centre, according to Crypto Briefing. That's Microsoft's real advantage over point-solution rivals like ElevenLabs. It doesn't need customers to sign a new vendor contract, it just flips a switch inside software companies already pay for.

A reasonable skeptic would ask whether Microsoft's own performance claims should be taken at face value, since the company controls both the benchmark comparisons and the pricing narrative. Microsoft has not published a third-party head-to-head test of MAI-Transcribe-2 against current OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs offerings in the material reviewed here. The 2.4% error rate on Artificial Analysis, an outside leaderboard, is the strongest independent data point available, and it applies to the prior model, not this one.

The price cuts are concrete. At $1.67 per 1,000 minutes, down from $6 per 1,000 minutes under MAI-Transcribe-1.5, according to Crypto Briefing, Microsoft has forced every competitor in this space to either match the cut or explain why their product is worth the premium. OpenAI, sitting on the other side of Microsoft's cloud partnership and its own investment stake, now has to answer that question about a company it depends on for compute.