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Mistral released an open-sourced voice model today that could rival paid voice AI, such as those from ElevenLabs and Hume AI, which the company said bridges the gap between proprietary speech recognition models and the more open, yet error-prone versions.
Voxtral, which Mistral will release under an Apache 2.0 license, is available in a 24B parameter version and a 3B variant. The larger model is intended for applications at scale, while the smaller version would work for local and edge use cases.
“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 said in a blog post. “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 available on Mistral’s API and a transcription-only endpoint on its website. The models are also accessible through Le Chat, Mistral’s chat platform.
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Mistral said that speech AI “meant choosing between two trade-offs,” pointing out that some open-source automated speech recognition models often had limited semantic understanding. Still, closed models with strong language understanding come at a high cost.
Bridging the gap
The company said 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 listen to and transcribe up to 30 minutes of audio or 40 minutes of audio understanding. It offers summarization, meaning the model can answer questions based on the audio content and generate summaries without switching to a separate mode. Users can trigger functions and API calls based on spoken instructions.
The model is based on Mistral’s Mistral Small 3.1. It supports multiple languages and can automatically detect languages such as English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Italian, and Dutch.
Mistral added enterprise features to Voxtral, including private deployment, so that organizations can integrate the model into their own ecosystems. These features also include domain-specific fine-tuning and advanced context and priority access to engineering resources for customers who need help integrating Voxtral into their workflows.
Performance
Speech recognition AI is now available on many platforms today. Users can speak to ChatGPT, and the platform will process spoken instructions similarly to written prompts. Fast food chains like White Castle have deployed SoundHound to their drive-thru services, and ElevenLabs has steadily been improving its multimodal platform. The open-source space also offers powerful options. Nari Labs, a startup, released the open-source speech model Dia in April. However, some of these services can be quite expensive.
Transcription services like Otter and Read.ai can now embed themselves into Zoom meetings, recording, summarizing and even alerting users to actionable items. Many online video meeting platforms offer not just transcription, but also speech AI and agentic AI, with Google Meetings providing the option to take notes for users using Gemini. As a regular user of voice transcription services, I can say firsthand that speech recognition AI is not perfect, but it is improving.
Mistral stated that Voxtral outperformed existing voice models, including OpenAI’s Whisper, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Scribe from ElevenLabs. Voxtral presented fewer word errors compared to Whisper, which is currently considered the best automatic speech recognition model available.
In terms 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 announcing Voxtral, social media users said they have been waiting for an open-source speech model that can match the performance of Whisper.
Mistral said Voxtral will be available through its API at $0.001 per minute.
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