Microsoft MAI-Transcribe-2 Tops FLEURS Benchmark Across 60 Languages

Microsoft has announced that MAI-Transcribe-2, its latest speech-to-text model, achieves top performance on the FLEURS benchmark across 60 languages, surpassing prior state-of-the-art results in multilingual automatic speech recognition. The FLEURS benchmark is a widely used evaluation covering a diverse set of languages including low-resource ones, making this result significant for global deployment scenarios. MAI-Transcribe-2 positions Microsoft as a serious competitor in multilingual transcription, an area where OpenAI's Whisper models have been dominant among developers. For teams building voice interfaces, transcription pipelines, or accessibility tools across non-English markets, this is a strong signal to run comparative evaluations against MAI-Transcribe-2. Microsoft has not yet announced general availability terms or pricing for the model.