Microsoft launches MAI-Transcribe-2 in Foundry at a price that undercuts the market

The new model is available now through Microsoft Foundry at 10 cents per processing hour — about 37 agorot (Israeli cents) — which works out to $1.67 per thousand audio minutes. That figure sits well below the direct competitors in the high-accuracy tier: ElevenLabs Scribe v2 charges $3.67, Smallest AI Pulse Pro runs $4, and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe asks $5 for the same volume. The gap positions Microsoft as an underdog trying to push the market toward commoditizing quality ASR.

According to Artificial Analysis benchmarks, MAI-Transcribe-2 posts an overall word error rate of 2.0%, placing it second in the general ranking. Broken down by dataset: 1.8% on AA-AgentTalk, which simulates natural conversation; 1.5% on VoxPopuli-Cleaned-AA, covering clean multilingual speech; and 3.0% on Earnings22-Cleaned-AA, focused on earnings-call dialogue with financial terminology. The numbers suggest strong stability across challenging domains, though the model holding the top spot was not disclosed.

For developers shipping to production, the combination of rock-bottom pricing and 2% WER rewrites the economics of embedding transcription in real-time apps or large batch workloads. Until now, anyone wanting quality at this level had to pay a significant premium to specialized vendors; Microsoft now offers a managed alternative inside the Azure ecosystem without the need to run separate infrastructure or pay three times more. Immediate availability in Foundry means quick integration without lengthy onboarding or contract negotiations.

The announcement omits latency figures, streaming support, and maximum file-length limits — critical parameters for live applications or long conversations. The identity of the first-place model also remains unknown, making it hard to gauge the gap to the absolute peak. Even so, at this point the cost-to-benefit ratio makes MAI-Transcribe-2 a sensible default for anyone building a product that needs accurate transcription and doesn't want to pay a brand tax.