Microsoft AI has released MAI-Transcribe-2, achieving 2.0% AA-WER (#2) at ~411x real time (#2) for $1.67 per 1,000 minutes, placing it on the accuracy-speed Pareto frontier at one of the lowest prices among high-accuracy models

MAI-Transcribe-2 is @MicrosoftAI’s latest speech transcription model, ranking 2nd overall on the Artificial Analysis Word Error Rate (AA-WER) leaderboard, behind Alibaba’s Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview (1.7% WER) and ahead of ElevenLabs Scribe v2 (2.2% WER) and Smallest AI Pulse Pro (2.4% WER). It is one of the fastest models benchmarked, processing audio at 411x real time, around 1.5x the speed of Smallest AI Pulse Pro and more than 7x the speed of Scribe v2.

At $1.67 per 1,000 minutes, MAI-Transcribe-2 costs less than half as much as high-accuracy peers including Scribe v2 ($3.67) and Smallest AI Pulse Pro ($4). The new model expands language support from 43 to 60 languages and adds speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, as well as clean and verbatim transcription styles.

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