Topic
Text-to-speech — 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 text-to-speech — 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 voice models undercut everyone — but the headline feature is unavailable in the EU, and the price doubles on 1 January
Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS on 23 September 2026 at $9 and $6 per million audio tokens, roughly a third of ElevenLabs. Both rates double on 1 January 2027, the same date the rest of the Flash line resets. Voice replication, the feature the launch leads with, is blocked in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, Illinois, Texas and India. And Google's #1 claim is measured on a benchmark built by a company whose founder now works at Google DeepMind.
Read story →