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Audio — AI news & analysis
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Microsoft bought the transcription accuracy crown at 3x the price floor — and the price expires in 89 days
On 1 October 2026 Microsoft AI shipped MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, its first streaming speech-to-text model, and claims the no. 1 accuracy rank on Artificial Analysis for both final and partial transcripts. It costs $0.54 per audio-hour — three times Meta's $0.18 streaming rate — and that $0.54 is explicitly an introductory price 'through the end of the year', with no successor rate published. The two voice models launched alongside it are the more interesting purchase — though not the cheapest, as first reported.
Read story →Google's Lyria 3.5 costs four times what a Suno song costs — and it is still the only frontier music model a developer can actually buy
Google shipped Lyria 3.5 to the Gemini app and opened the Gemini API at $0.08 per song. That is 4x Suno Pro's effective per-song rate. It reads like a losing price until you notice Suno has never sold a public API, and that every Lyria output carries a SynthID mark while Suno's watermarking is still rolling out.
Read story →Google's new transcription model didn't reset the speech-to-text price floor — it finally brought Google down to it
Gemini 3.5 Transcribe entered public preview on 26 August 2026 at roughly $0.30 per audio-hour with diarization included, claiming 2.6% WER. The headline reads like a price war. The rate card says otherwise: Deepgram and AssemblyAI have been at or below that number for years. What actually got repriced by ~64% is Google's own Cloud Speech-to-Text. Here is the real comparison, the billing-model catch nobody is mentioning, and the session limits that decide whether you can use it at all.
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