Microsoft's MAI-Transcribe-2 hits 2.0% WER at 411x real-time, priced at $1.67 per 1,000 minutes

ArtificialAnlys · x · 2026-09-03

Artificial Analysis benchmarks Microsoft AI's new MAI-Transcribe-2 speech model: 2.0% AA-WER (#2, behind Alibaba's Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview at 1.7%), 411x real-time speed (7x faster than ElevenLabs Scribe v2), and $1.67 per 1,000 minutes — less than half the price of Scribe v2 ($3.67) or Smallest AI Pulse Pro ($4). Language support expands from 43 to 60 languages, adding speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, and clean/verbatim styles. It tops the accuracy-speed Pareto frontier among high-accuracy models.

Related event: Microsoft Launches MAI-Transcribe-2: Faster, Second-Most Accurate, and Cheapest in Class(7 posts)→

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