The Hear layer led the week with 2 of 3 filings, from Microsoft and Commure.
Foundry-priced multilingual ASR at $0.36/hr with a claimed 2.5× Azure Fast batch speed — FLEURS wins are Microsoft's own comparisons.
Microsoft released MAI-Transcribe-1 on Microsoft Foundry and the MAI Playground, a multilingual speech-to-text model covering the top 25 product languages, priced from $0.36 per audio hour with claimed 2.5× batch speed versus Azure Fast transcription.
MAI-Transcribe-1
Adds modular clinical dictation beside ambient — same pattern as Suki Dictation later in August.
Also Use
Commure introduced Dictation, an AI clinical voice product that places speech-to-text at the cursor inside clinical applications to speed documentation alongside its ambient scribe line.
Dictation
Foundry TTS with few-second custom voice cloning at $22/1M characters and a claimed 60× realtime generation factor — pairs with same-day Transcribe-1 for a Microsoft voice stack.
Microsoft released MAI-Voice-1 on Microsoft Foundry with secure custom-voice creation from a few seconds of audio, claiming 60 seconds of speech generated per second of compute and pricing from $22 per 1M characters.
MAI-Voice-1