Microsoft AI announced on October 1 its first streaming transcription model, MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, alongside two new text-to-speech models, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The three models together give developers a first-party Microsoft voice pipeline for conversational agents, available through Microsoft Foundry and Azure AI Speech. All three are in public preview: no SLA, and Azure does not recommend them for production workloads.

The transcription model returns first partial results just over 100 milliseconds after speech begins, transcribes 60 languages with continuous automatic language detection, and claims the number-one accuracy spot on Artificial Analysis for both final and partial transcripts. Introductory pricing is $0.54 per audio hour through the end of the year. MAI-Voice-2.1 speaks 23 languages with a native accent in each, supports voice cloning from a few seconds of reference audio (with access approval and consent requirements), and costs $22 per million characters; the Flash variant drops latency to 150 milliseconds at $15 per million characters.

The stack completes a latency budget Microsoft is eager to advertise: roughly 130 milliseconds to hear, 350 to think, 150 to start speaking — a full conversational turn in well under one second. It's Microsoft AI's answer to voice offerings from OpenAI and Google, and a direct attempt to pull voice-agent workloads into the Foundry/Azure ecosystem.