Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe-2 tops FLEURS across 60 languages at 5.2% word-error rate
Microsoft's in-house MAI-Transcribe-2 ranks first on the FLEURS benchmark across 60 languages with a 5.2% average word-error rate, and Artificial Analysis clocks it 10x faster than OpenAI's GPT-Transcribe, 7x faster than ElevenLabs' Scribe v2, and 5x faster than Gemini 3.5 Transcribe. At $0.10 per hour through year-end via Microsoft Foundry, MAI Playground, and OpenRouter, multilingual transcription with diarization and word-level timestamps collapses to a single model and a price floor competitors now have to answer.
Source: microsoft.ai ↗
It's not only our most capable transcription model yet, but the most capable and efficient amongst our competitors.
Microsoft MAI
Why this matters
- → 10x speed advantage collapses transcription costs for real-time and batch workloads
- → Single multilingual model replaces vendor lock-in across 60 languages
- → Price floor ($0.10/hr) forces industry reset on speech AI economics
Speech AI's turning point