Microsoft slashes speech AI price to 10 cents per hour

What happened

Microsoft AI released MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-recognition model it claims is faster, more accurate, and cheaper than offerings from OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs. The early-bird price is 10 cents per hour of audio, down from $0.36 an hour for the first model five months ago—a reduction of roughly 72%.

Why it matters

For an enterprise processing 100,000 hours of call-center audio a year, the annual bill drops from $36,000 to $10,000. At this level, transcription becomes a negligible cost, potentially reshaping budgeting decisions for large banks and telecoms.

What to watch

This launch is part of Microsoft's strategy to build its own frontier-class models and swap them into products that once ran on OpenAI's technology. Transcription is the area where this plan has progressed fastest.