Overview
- Microsoft AI, which on Thursday opened public previews for MAI‑Transcribe‑1, MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑Image‑2, published pricing and made them available to developers through Microsoft Foundry and the MAI Playground.
- Microsoft claims benchmark leads, saying MAI‑Transcribe‑1 posts the lowest word‑error rate on the FLEURS test across 25 languages, MAI‑Voice‑1 generates 60 seconds of audio in one second, and MAI‑Image‑2 ranks in the top three on Arena.ai.
- The company lists prices at $0.36 per hour for transcription, $22 per million characters for voice, and $5 per million input tokens and $33 per million image output tokens for image generation.
- The models already power products such as Copilot, Bing, PowerPoint and Azure Speech, and early enterprise use includes WPP’s creative production workloads.
- A 2025 contract revision with OpenAI lets Microsoft develop its own frontier models while keeping license rights through 2032, and today’s release comes with noted gaps such as missing diarization, streaming and some image‑editing features that Microsoft says are in development.