Introducing MAI-Transcribe-1, alongside MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2. World-class quality at lightning speeds, now available at the most competitive prices.

Available now in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground.

MAI-Transcribe-1 delivers state-of-the-art speech-to-text transcription across the top 25 most-used languages ¹ according to the industry-standard FLEURS benchmark. ² Built to deliver world class quality in messy, real-world environments, its batch transcription speed is 2.5x that of existing Microsoft Azure Fast offering. It’s also incredibly efficient, making MAI-Transcribe-1 not just the most accurate, but also lightning fast. It’s now available in Foundry at the best price-performance of any large cloud provider.

MAI-Voice-1 is our top-tier voice generation model. Built to generate natural, realistic speech, rich with nuance, emotional range and expression that preserves speaker identity even across long-form content.

Today we’re adding the ability to safely and securely create your own custom voice in Microsoft Foundry with just a few seconds of audio. MAI-Voice-1 can transform how easily developers can build voice experiences and voice agents – at high quality and high speed.

The model can generate 60 seconds of audio in just a single second, and highly efficient GPU usage delivers that quality and speed affordably. Hearing is believing, so experience it for yourself with Copilot Audio Expressions or Copilot Podcasts.

MAI-Image-2 has turbocharged image generation performance and speed on Copilot after debuting as a top 3 model family on the Arena.ai leaderboard. Users experience at least 2x faster generation times on Foundry and Copilot with similar quality, based on real-world production traffic data. Phased rollouts are also underway in Bing and PowerPoint.

MAI-Image-2 was created with photographers, designers, and visual storytellers that demand natural lighting, accurate skin tones and texture, and clear in-image text for diagrams, layouts, and graphics. Once again, speed and quality don’t come at higher costs – MAI-Image-2 is offered at competitive price-to-performance.

Customers are already embracing MAI-Image-2 for creative work. WPP, one of the world’s largest marketing and communications groups, is among the first enterprise partners building with MAI-Image-2 at scale.

“MAI-Image-2 is a genuine game-changer. It’s a platform that not only responds to the intricate nuance of creative direction, but deeply respects the sheer craft involved in generating real-world, campaign-ready images,” said Rob Reilly, Global Chief Creative Officer, WPP. “WPP has some of the best creative talent in the world and MAI-Image-2 is making them even better.”

MAI Models: Better, faster, and cheaper than our competitors.

We are rapidly deploying these top-tier models to power our own consumer and commercial products. We’re excited to share the quality, speed, and efficiency gains with our Microsoft Foundry customers with very competitive pricing.

· MAI-Transcribe-1 starts at $0.36 per hour.

· MAI-Voice-1 starts at $22 per 1M characters.

· MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 per 1M tokens for text input and $33 per 1M tokens for image output.

Available now on Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground.

Starting today, every developer can build with MAI models, including MAI-Transcribe-1, through Microsoft Foundry. You can also try them in the MAI Playground (US only).

Interested in MAI models but don’t have Foundry access?
Fill out this form and we’ll be in touch.

Models that are built to be better from the inside out.

At Microsoft AI, we’re building Humanist AI. We have a distinct view when creating our AI models — putting humans at the center, optimizing for how people actually communicate, training for practical use. You’ll see more models from us soon in Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.

Consistent with our commitment to safe and responsible AI, these MAI models were developed, tested, and rigorously red-teamed. Through Microsoft Foundry, developers get built-in guardrails, governance, and enterprise-grade controls designed to support safe, compliant deployment at scale.

Model Cards

Download Model Card for MAI-Transcribe-1

Download Model Card for MAI-Voice-1

Download Model Card for MAI-Image-2

^1. Top 25 languages by Microsoft product usage.

^2. Out of the top 25 global languages, MAI-Transcribe-1 ranks 1st by FLEURS in 11 core languages. It wins against Whisper-large-v3 on the remaining 14 and Gemini 3.1 Flash on 11 of those 14.

At Microsoft AI (MAI) we believe AI should be used to empower every person on the planet. We are creating AI for everyone, a supportive, helpful presence always in the service of humanity. It will be the gateway to a universe of knowledge and a set of capabilities that enable people and organizations to achieve more. Responsible, reliable, filled with personality and expertise, we are focused on creating applied AI as a platform for category defining and deeply trusted products that understand each of our unique needs.

Since last year, we’ve been focused on building the foundation for this vision, with a world class team and infrastructure. To fully meet our goals, MAI requires purpose-built models. Today, we’re excited to preview the first steps to making this a reality.

• First, we’re releasing MAI-Voice-1, our first highly expressive and natural speech generation model, which is available in Copilot Daily and Podcasts, and as a brand new Copilot Labs experience to try out here. Voice is the interface of the future for AI companions and MAI-Voice-1 delivers high-fidelity, expressive audio across both single and multi-speaker scenarios.
• Second, we have begun public testing of MAI-1-preview on LMArena, a popular platform for community model evaluation. This represents MAI’s first foundation model trained end-to-end and offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot. We are actively spinning the flywheel to deliver improved models. We’ll have much more to share in the coming months. Stay tuned!

We have big ambitions for where we go next. Not only will we pursue further advances here, but we believe that orchestrating a range of specialized models serving different user intents and use cases will unlock immense value. There will be a lot more to come from this team on both fronts in the near future. We’re excited by the work ahead as we aim to deliver leading models and put them into the hands of people globally.

Try MAI-Voice-1 in Copilot and Copilot Labs

MAI-Voice-1 is a lightning-fast speech generation model, with an ability to generate a full minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU, making it one of the most efficient speech systems available today.

MAI-Voice-1 is already powering our Copilot Daily and Podcasts features. We are also launching it in Copilot Labs where you can try our expressive speech and storytelling demos. Imagine creating a “choose your own adventure” story with just a simple prompt, or crafting a bespoke guided meditation to help you sleep. Give it a try!

Try MAI-1-preview in LMArena

MAI-1-preview is an in-house mixture-of-experts model, pre-trained and post-trained on ~15,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. This model is designed to provide powerful capabilities to consumers seeking to benefit from models that specialize in following instructions and providing helpful responses to everyday queries.

We will be rolling MAI-1-preview out for certain text use cases within Copilot over the coming weeks to learn and improve from user feedback. We will continue to use the very best models from our team, our partners, and the latest innovations from the open-source community to power our products. This approach gives us the flexibility to deliver the best outcomes across millions of unique interactions every day.

In addition to LMArena, we are also making this model available to trusted testers – apply for API access here. We’re excited to collect early feedback to learn more about where the model performs well and how we can make it better. Stay tuned for more.