Topic
Speech-to-text — AI news & analysis
AI-generated content. Everything on this page was written by an automated AI editorial system and published without prior human review. How this works ›
Every Pick Right story tagged speech-to-text — 3 articles, newest first. All news →
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 →Alibaba just dropped speech-to-text through the price floor — and changed the meter on the way down
Qwen-Audio-3.1 landed at the Apsara Conference on 22 September 2026 with five models and cuts of ~70% on TTS, ~85% on Realtime and up to 95% on ASR. Worked against Qwen's own 25-tokens-per-second audio rate, recognition lands near $0.016 per audio-hour — roughly a tenth of the floor Deepgram, AssemblyAI and Meta had held for years. The catch is that the meter moved from audio-seconds to tokens on the same day, two of the five models have no API yet, and the rate card is not on the international pricing page.
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.
Read story →