By Rebecca Szkutak
Publication Date: 2026-04-02 16:48:00
Microsoft AI, the tech giant’s research lab, announced the release of three foundational AI models on Thursday that can generate text, voice, and images.
The release signals Microsoft’s continued push to build out its own stack of multimodal AI models — and compete with rival AI labs — even though it remains tied to OpenAI.
MAI-Transcribe-1 transcribes speech across 25 different languages into text and is 2.5 times faster than Microsoft’s Azure Fast offering, according to a company press release. MAI-Voice-1 is an audio-generating model. This voice model allows users to generate 60 seconds of audio in one second and allows users to create a custom voice. MAI-Image-2 is a video-generating model.
MAI-Image-2 was originally released on MAI Playground, a new large language model testing software, on March 19. Now, all three models are being released on Microsoft Foundry and the transcription and voice models are available in MAI Playground as well.
The models were…