Developers can now access a trio of new audio models—MAI-Voice-2.1, MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash, and MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming—via Microsoft's APIs and MAI Playground to create conversational voice agents. The transcription tool currently holds the top spot among 38 models on the AA-WER Streaming benchmark, achieving a 2.5% word error rate (WER) and delivering transcripts 0.13s after speech ends. It displaces SpaceXAI's Grok Voice Transcribe 2.0, which had a 2.7% WER and 0.49s latency.

Streaming transcription costs $0.54 per hour, or $9 per 1,000 minutes, placing the service level with Gemini 3.5 Transcribe Live but above the $6.50 charged by ElevenLabs and Deepgram Flux. Despite these rates, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman claimed the model is 60% cheaper and 55% faster than ElevenLabs. Non-streaming transcription is available for $0.10 per hour, or $1.67 per 1,000 minutes.