Microsoft cut cloud transcription to 10 cents an hour, and the catch is in the small print
The short version
Microsoft’s batch transcription model runs at $0.10 per hour of audio until 31 December. The streaming version is $0.54 per hour, or 5.4 times the batch rate, for half a point of accuracy. Both are introductory prices with no announced successor.
What changed
Microsoft shipped two versions of the same speech model. The batch version, MAI-Transcribe-2, costs $0.10 per hour of audio at a 2.0% word error rate. The streaming version, MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, costs $0.54 per hour at a claimed 2.5% error rate and finalises a transcript about 0.13 seconds after speech ends.
| Model | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| MAI-Transcribe-2 (batch) | $0.10per audio hour | 2.0% WER, file in, transcript out |
| MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming | $0.54per audio hour | 2.5% WER, live partial transcripts |
| MAI-Voice-2.1 | $22per 1M characters | Text to speech, 23 languages |
| MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash | $15per 1M characters | Faster, cheaper TTS tier |
The catch nobody prints
Three things, all in the small print. First, both rates are introductory and run out on 31 December 2026, with no replacement price published. Second, streaming costs 5.4 times the batch rate for slightly worse accuracy, which is the opposite of how volume pricing usually works. Third, this is a public preview with no service level agreement.
It is also not the cheapest option on the market. xAI lists streaming transcription at $0.20 an hour and Meta at $0.18, so Microsoft is competing on accuracy and language coverage rather than on price.
What it means if you already transcribe
If you were paying around $12 an hour for cloud transcription, this is a genuine 20 to 100 times cut, and it makes the paid tier competitive with running Whisper on your own machine. If you only transcribe a few hours a month, local is still cheaper: it costs nothing per hour and you already own the computer. Our full comparison is in local Whisper vs cloud transcription.
Source
Microsoft AI model pages and announcement posts (microsoft.ai), read 20 October 2026. Competitor streaming prices from the Artificial Analysis comparison published 2 October 2026.