MAI-Transcribe in LLM Speech API - Speech Service

Learn how to use the MAI-Transcribe model in Azure Speech LLM Speech API.

This feature is currently in public preview. This preview is provided without a service-level agreement, and is not recommended for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities. For more information, see Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.

MAI‑Transcribe models are speech recognition models developed by the Microsoft AI (MAI) Superintelligence team. These models are optimized for both high accuracy and high efficiency, and are available through the LLM Speech API.

The following models are supported:

• mai-transcribe-1.5
• mai-transcribe-1: Deprecated on Aug 20, 2026.

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription. You can create one for free.
• A Microsoft Foundry resource for Speech in the Azure portal.
• The Speech resource key and region. After your Speech resource is deployed, select Go to resource to view and manage keys. For the current list of supported regions, see Speech service regions.
• An audio file (less than 300 MB in size) in one of these formats: WAV, MP3, or FLAC.

Language support

By default, the model operates in multi-lingual mode. The following languages are currently supported:

Language code	Language	MAI-Transcribe-1.5 support	MAI-transcribe-1 support
ar	Arabic	✅	✅
as	Assamese	✅
bg	Bulgarian	✅
bn	Bengali	✅
ca	Catalan	✅
cs	Czech	✅	✅
da	Danish	✅	✅
de	German	✅	✅
el	Greek	✅
en	English	✅	✅
es	Spanish	✅	✅
et	Estonian	✅
fi	Finnish	✅	✅
fr	French	✅	✅
gu	Gujarati	✅
hi	Hindi	✅	✅
hu	Hungarian	✅	✅
id	Indonesian	✅	✅
it	Italian	✅	✅
ja	Japanese	✅	✅
kn	Kannada	✅
ko	Korean	✅	✅
lt	Lithuanian	✅
ml	Malayalam	✅
mr	Marathi	✅
nb	Norwegian Bokmål	✅	✅
nl	Dutch	✅	✅
or	Odia	✅
pa	Punjabi (Gurmukhi script)	✅
pl	Polish	✅	✅
pt	Portuguese	✅	✅
ro	Romanian	✅	✅
ru	Russian	✅	✅
sk	Slovak	✅
sl	Slovenian	✅
sv	Swedish	✅	✅
ta	Tamil	✅
te	Telugu	✅
th	Thai	✅	✅
tr	Turkish	✅	✅
uk	Ukrainian	✅
vi	Vietnamese	✅	✅
zh	Chinese (simplified)	✅	✅

Use a MAI-Transcribe model

You can use MAI‑Transcribe models with the LLM Speech API to generate transcriptions from audio input.

Note the following limitations when you use a MAI-Transcribe model:

• Diarization isn’t supported.
• Prompt-tuning isn’t supported.
• Phrase list and transcribe style are supported only in mai-transcribe-1.5.

Use MAI-Transcribe with Voice Live

You can also use the MAI-Transcribe model for input audio transcription in the Voice Live API. Set the model field in the input_audio_transcription session configuration. For details, see How to customize Voice Live input and output.

Related content

• For more information about using LLM Speech API, see LLM Speech API
• MAI-Voice in Azure Speech
• How to customize Voice Live input and output