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Microsoft Launches Multilingual Voice AI 'MAI-Voice-2'

June 4, 2026 at 15:01 EDT

On June 4, 2026, Microsoft released demo audio for MAI-Voice-2, a highly expressive text-to-speech (TTS) model supporting 15 languages, and began offering it through Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter. The official @MicrosoftAI account posted expressive voice samples and added the same day that the model was available. Pricing is $22 per 1M characters, with access via Microsoft Foundry (public preview), the Azure Speech API, and OpenRouter. Source

June 4, 2026 · Microsoft AI

MAI-Voice-2: expressive speech that switches languages mid-sentence

Microsoft's in-house MAI team ships a highly expressive text-to-speech model spanning 15 languages, with zero-shot voice cloning, emotion control and native code-switching — part of a push to reduce its reliance on OpenAI.

languages, incl. English, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese

$22

per 1M characters (public preview)

5–60s

reference audio for zero-shot voice cloning

0.5–2×

playback speed · MP3/PCM 24kHz output

Listener preference: v2 vs v1

~2,500 head-to-head tests

MAI-Voice-2

72%

MAI-Voice-1

28%

In speaker-similarity tests across 11 languages (~2,222 responses), generated audio reached a level reportedly hard to distinguish from real recordings.

What it can do

Code-switching

Switch languages mid-conversation (Hindi-English, Spanish-English)

Emotion & style

Cheerful, sad, excited — controlled via SSML

Long-form stability

Speaker consistency in long content, low latency

Praise

Natural reproduction of accents and seamless language switching; developers highlight 15-language support, emotion control and long-form stability.

Criticism

Some say it "still feels too robotic." Large-scale real-world reviews remain few, so fuller evaluation is yet to come.

The bigger picture

Rolled out around Build 2026 alongside the MAI family — MAI-Image-2.5, MAI-Transcribe-1.5 and MAI-Code-1 — integrating with Azure, Copilot, Teams and Dynamics.

VS Code integration planned Dynamics 365 Contact Center DuoAI demo + MAI-Transcribe-1.5 Faster, lower-cost Flash version coming

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