Microsoft AI launched Thursday MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech recognition model priced at 10 cents per hour of audio, representing a 72% price cut from the previous model charged at 0.36 dollar per hour. For a company processing 100,000 hours of call center audio annually, the annual bill drops from 36,000 to 10,000 dollars. Microsoft claims this new model undercuts the current offerings from OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs on both price and processing speed. This offensive is part of CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s strategy for the Microsoft AI division, which aims to own the full multimodal stack by integrating these models into Microsoft products already used by enterprises. The situation creates notable tension: Microsoft remains OpenAI’s largest investor and cloud partner while developing models that directly compete with OpenAI’s products.
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