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Microsoft AI's MAI-Transcribe-2 undercuts OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs on price and speed

Microsoft AI's MAI-Transcribe-2 undercuts OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs on price and speed

AI VentureBeat
Microsoft is aggressively integrating its proprietary MAI-Transcribe-2 model to replace OpenAI-powered components with lower costs and higher throughput.
What: MAI-Transcribe-2 offers speech-to-text across 60 languages for $0.10 per hour, directly competing with and undercutting models from OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs.
Why it matters: Microsoft is shifting toward vertical integration, replacing external dependencies like OpenAI with its own high-performance, modality-specific models to capture more of the inference value chain.
Original article

MAI-Transcribe-2 is a speech-recognition model that Microsoft says is faster, more accurate, and cheaper than anything its competitors currently sell. It is priced at 10 cents per hour of audio. The model transcribes audio in 60 languages. Microsoft's strategy seems to be to build its own frontier-class models one modality at a time, then steadily swap them into products that once ran on OpenAI's technology.

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