Mistral launched an open-sourced voice mannequin as we speak that would rival paid voice AI, resembling these from ElevenLabs and Hume AI, which the corporate mentioned bridges the hole between proprietary speech recognition fashions and the extra open, but error-prone variations.
Voxtral, which Mistral will launch beneath an Apache 2.0 license, is accessible in a 24B parameter model and a 3B variant. The bigger mannequin is meant for purposes at scale, whereas the smaller model would work for native and edge use circumstances.
“Voice was humanity’s first interface—long before writing or typing, it let us share ideas, coordinate work, and build relationships. As digital systems become more capable, voice is returning as our most natural form of human-computer interaction,” Mistral mentioned in a weblog submit. “Yet today’s systems remain limited—unreliable, proprietary, and too brittle for real-world use. Closing this gap demands tools with exceptional transcription, deep understanding, multilingual fluency, and open, flexible deployment.”
Voxtral is accessible on Mistral’s API and a transcription-only endpoint on its web site. The fashions are additionally accessible by way of Le Chat, Mistral’s chat platform.
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Mistral mentioned that speech AI “meant choosing between two trade-offs,” mentioning that some open-source automated speech recognition fashions usually had restricted semantic understanding. Nonetheless, closed fashions with robust language understanding come at a excessive value.
Bridging the hole
The corporate mentioned Voxtral “offers state-of-the-art accuracy and native semantic understanding in the open, at less than half the price of comparable APIs.”
Voxtral, at a 32K token context, can hearken to and transcribe as much as half-hour of audio or 40 minutes of audio understanding. It affords summarization, which means the mannequin can reply questions primarily based on the audio content material and generate summaries with out switching to a separate mode. Customers can set off capabilities and API calls primarily based on spoken directions.
The mannequin relies on Mistral’s Mistral Small 3.1. It helps a number of languages and might mechanically detect languages resembling English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Italian, and Dutch.
Mistral added enterprise options to Voxtral, together with non-public deployment, in order that organizations can combine the mannequin into their very own ecosystems. These options additionally embrace domain-specific fine-tuning and superior context and precedence entry to engineering assets for purchasers who need assistance integrating Voxtral into their workflows.
Efficiency
Speech recognition AI is now out there on many platforms as we speak. Customers can communicate to ChatGPT, and the platform will course of spoken directions equally to written prompts. Quick meals chains like White Fortress have deployed SoundHound to their drive-thru providers, and ElevenLabs has steadily been enhancing its multimodal platform. The open-source area additionally affords highly effective choices. Nari Labs, a startup, launched the open-source speech mannequin Dia in April. Nonetheless, a few of these providers could be fairly costly.
Transcription providers like Otter and Learn.ai can now embed themselves into Zoom conferences, recording, summarizing and even alerting customers to actionable objects. Many on-line video assembly platforms supply not simply transcription, but additionally speech AI and agentic AI, with Google Conferences offering the choice to take notes for customers utilizing Gemini. As a daily person of voice transcription providers, I can say firsthand that speech recognition AI shouldn’t be good, however it’s enhancing.
Mistral said that Voxtral outperformed current voice fashions, together with OpenAI’s Whisper, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Scribe from ElevenLabs. Voxtral introduced fewer phrase errors in comparison with Whisper, which is presently thought-about the very best automated speech recognition mannequin out there.
By way of audio understanding, Voxtral Small is “competitive with GPT-4o-mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash across all tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in Speech Translation.”
Since saying Voxtral, social media customers mentioned they’ve been ready for an open-source speech mannequin that may match the efficiency of Whisper.
Sure! We wanted this. Every week in the past, I used to be lamenting over a closed-source AI universe and cyberpunk dystopian future, however as we speak, with this addition, my outlook is way improved – go open-source. https://t.co/QsKAfTOxou
— David Hendrickson (@TeksEdge) July 15, 2025
Mistral mentioned Voxtral will probably be out there by way of its API at $0.001 per minute.
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