Microsoft Launches MAI-Transcribe-1, MAI-Voice-1, MAI-Image-2 — In-House Models Challenge OpenAI

Microsoft AI·high signal

Microsoft released three in-house MAI models on April 2: MAI-Transcribe-1 achieves lowest average Word Error Rate (3.8%) on FLEURS benchmark across 25 languages, beating OpenAI Whisper-large-v3 on all 25 and Gemini 3.1 Flash on 22 of 25. MAI-Voice-1 enables custom voice cloning from short audio snippets; MAI-Image-2 ranks top 3 on Arena.ai image leaderboard. All available through Microsoft Foundry with competitive pricing ($0.36/hour audio transcription).