As AI methods change into extra succesful, speech is quick changing into the default means we talk with machines. French AI startup Mistral has jumped into the audio race with its first open mannequin, aiming to problem the dominance of walled-off company methods with open-weight alternate options.
On Tuesday, Mistral introduced the discharge of Voxtral, its first household of audio fashions geared toward companies.
The corporate is pitching Voxtral as the primary open mannequin that’s able to deploying “really usable speech intelligence in manufacturing.”
In different phrases, not will builders have to decide on between an inexpensive, open system that fumbles transcriptions and doesn’t actually perceive what’s being mentioned, and one which capabilities nicely, however is closed, leaving builders with a better invoice and fewer management over deployment.
For companies, which means Voxtral presents an inexpensive various that the corporate claims is “lower than half the worth” of comparable options.
Mistral says Voxtral can transcribe as much as half-hour of audio. As a result of its LLM spine, Mistral Small 3.1, it may possibly perceive as much as 40 minutes, permitting customers to ask questions concerning the audio content material, generate summaries, or flip voice instructions into real-time actions like calling APIs or working capabilities. Voxtral can also be multilingual, with the power to transcribe and perceive languages together with English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Dutch, and Italian.
The corporate is providing up two variants of its “speech understanding fashions”. The primary, Voxtral Small, has 24B parameters for production-scale deployments, and is aggressive with ElevenLabs Scribe, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini 2.5 Flash.
The second, Voxtral Mini, has 3 billion parameters for native and edge deployments. There’s additionally an ultra-cheap, stripped-down, quick API model of the 3B mannequin referred to as Voxtral Mini Transcribe that’s optimized for transcription-only use circumstances and guarantees to outperform OpenAI Whisper for lower than half the worth.
Customers can attempt Voxtral without cost by downloading the API on Hugging Face or testing the fashions in Mistral’s chatbot Le Chat. Integrating the API into functions begins at $0.001 per minute, in response to the corporate.
The launch comes a month after Mistral introduced Magistral, its first household of reasoning fashions that work via issues step-by-step for improved reliability.
Mistral, one of many prime AI companies in Europe, is well-known for its advocacy pushing open supply AI fashions. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that the corporate is in talks to boost as much as $1 billion in fairness from buyers like Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund.
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