New Microsoft AI models bring faster transcription and multilingual voices

Microsoft released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, MAI-Voice-2.1, and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash, providing low-latency transcription in 60 languages and multilingual text-to-speech capabilities. The streaming model generates partial transcripts within 100 milliseconds, enabling real-time voice agent interactions. Introductory pricing is set at $0.54 per hour of audio through year-end, with claims of top-tier accuracy on Artificial Analysis benchmarks.