Microsoft releases streaming transcription and multilingual voice models with separate prices
Microsoft’s new streaming transcription supports 60 languages at $0.54 per audio hour through year-end. Two speech models support 23 languages and can preserve a speaker’s voice.
Microsoft released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash for streaming transcription and speech generation. Transcription supports 60 languages and continuous automatic language detection. Microsoft says first provisional text arrives just over 100 milliseconds after receiving audio and is refined with context; a completed transcript requires further processing.
The transcription promotional price through year-end is $0.54 per hour of audio. The voice models support 23 languages and 26 locales, with MAI-Voice-2.1 priced at $22 per million characters and Flash at $15. Microsoft says the models preserve a speaker's identity while using the accent appropriate to each language. Character-based speech pricing and audio-hour transcription pricing need separate estimates.
The company also says Flash can generate 45 seconds of audio with 150 milliseconds of end-to-end generation latency, and that a few seconds of reference audio support cross-language voice cloning with built-in consent protections. These are vendor reports that AiEvent has not independently measured. Audio generation speed also excludes the full time an agent spends listening, reasoning, calling tools and responding.
Sources
- Our first streaming transcription model debuts at no. 1 on Artificial Analysis | Microsoft AI — Microsoft AI
- Microsoft AI releases new transcription and text-to-speech models for voice agents — The Decoder