Microsoft's new speech model beats Whisper at bargain prices
Microsoft just launched MAI-Transcribe-1, a multilingual speech-to-text model now in public preview on Microsoft Foundry. Supporting 25 languages, it achieves the lowest Word Error Rate on the FLEURS benchmark—topping Whisper-large-V3—while running batch jobs 2.5x faster at $0.36 per audio hour. Why it matters: Exceptional noise resilience paired with rock-bottom pricing makes voice agents far cheaper to run, and it is already rolling into Teams and Copilot.