Microsoft AI, a research arm of Microsoft, announced Thursday that it has launched three basic AI models that can generate text, speech, and images.
This release represents Microsoft’s continued efforts to build its own multimodal AI model stack and compete with rival AI labs, even though Microsoft remains tied to OpenAI.
According to a company press release, MAI-Transcribe-1 converts speech to text in 25 languages and is 2.5 times faster than Microsoft’s Azure Fast product. MAI-Voice-1 is an audio generation model. This voice model allows users to generate 60 seconds of audio per second and create custom voices. MAI-Image-2 is a video generation model.
MAI-Image-2 was originally released on March 19th by MAI Playground, a new large-scale language model testing software. All three models are now available in Microsoft Foundry, and transcription and speech models are also available in MAI Playground.
The model was developed by the Microsoft MAI Superintelligence team, an AI research team led by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman that was formed and announced in November 2025.
“At Microsoft AI, we are building Humanist AI. We have a distinct perspective: putting humans at the center when creating AI models, optimizing how people actually communicate, and training them for real-world use,” Suleyman wrote in a blog post. “You’ll soon be able to see more models in the Foundry and directly in Microsoft products and experiences.”
In an increasingly crowded LLM market, MAI hopes the selling point of these models will be that they are cheaper than those from Google and OpenAI, the company wrote in a blog post.
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MAI-Transcribe-1 starts at $0.36 per hour. MAI-Voice-1 starts at $22 for 1 million characters, while MAI-Image-2 starts at $5 for 1 million tokens for text input and $33 for 1 million tokens for image output.
Despite launching its own model, Suleyman reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to its partnership with OpenAI in an interview with VentureBeat. Although the recent partnership renegotiation allows Microsoft to truly pursue superintelligence research, Suleyman told The Verge.
Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in its AI labs and hosts models across a variety of products through multi-year partnerships. Microsoft takes the same stance on chips. We produce it ourselves and also buy from external players.
