Azure Speech 06 2026
Microsoft
Speech to textTranscribes a recording into words
- Type
- Proprietary
- Input
- None held
- Output
- None held
- Cached
- None held
We don't hold a list price for this model yet · hosted only — no weights published
Our take
Written Aug 2, 2026Azure Speech is Microsoft's hosted-only transcription service that turns audio into text across 25 languages. It excels on clean, studio-quality narration with very low error rates, but degrades sharply on podcasts, meetings and accented speech where roughly one word in thirteen is wrong.
Pick this for controlled-audio narration or audiobook work where the recording quality is high, or for multilingual deployments needing broad language coverage — though accuracy beyond English is unverified in our data. Skip it if you are transcribing natural conversation, accented speakers, or uncontrolled audio like podcasts and video, where error rates climb more than sixfold.
The case for it
- Excellent on clean read-aloud audio, with a word error rate roughly a quarter of its own benchmark average.
- 25 languages supported, broader coverage than most transcription services.
The case against it
- Degrades sharply in natural, uncontrolled audio: podcasts and video run roughly six times the clean-speech error rate.
- Accented speech is the worst condition measured, at over six times the clean-read rate.
- No pricing or availability data: zero offers in our catalogue and no release date disclosed.
How good is it?
TranscriptionTurning speech into text5 of 5Open ASR WER · 3rd of 74
95.5%
Misses roughly one word in 22, averaged over nine English test sets.
25
Stated by the leaderboard; we do not hold the list itself.
Percentage of words wrong on each set, lower better. Bars are scaled to this model's own worst case, not to the board.
The figures above come from the Open ASR Leaderboard, an independent public test that runs every model on the same recordings. It is the only measurement of transcription quality we know of, so there are no other scores to show.
These tests check whether a model follows instructions — a precondition for all the work above, but not a measure of how well that work is done, which is why they get no rating.
Every published score for this model8 scoresEvery figure we hold, from 8 boards, with who ran it and a link to the source — including the boards no rating above is built on.
Where to get it
We hold no priced listing for Azure Speech 06 2026.
There is no copy to download and no host in our price data, so Microsoft is where to look. We watch OpenRouter, the provider APIs we track and the LiteLLM price set; this version appears in none of them, which is a gap in what we collect rather than a statement about what Microsoft sells.
When we formed this view
Dates behind this page
Prices last checked 6h ago
What we do not know about this model yet
- Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
- We don't hold a list price for this model yet — the gap is ours, not the lab's.
Licence and identifiers
What the licence allowsWe hold no licence record for this model. Inside are the identifiers you need to pull it — its Hugging Face repo where we have one, our slug and a machine-readable card.
Licence
Commercial API terms. We hold no licence record for this model, so there is nothing to summarise here.
Identifiers
- Modality record
- audio->text
- Catalogue slug
- microsoft-azure-speech-06-2026