Mistral introduced Voxtral, its initial open-source AI audio model family, on Tuesday, aiming to provide businesses with a production-ready speech intelligence solution. This release challenges existing corporate systems by offering an open-weight alternative for audio processing. The company positions Voxtral as an open model that facilitates usable speech intelligence in production environments.
Voxtral intends to address the dilemma faced by developers, who often choose between inexpensive open systems with transcription inaccuracies and functional but closed systems that entail higher costs and less deployment control. For businesses, Voxtral is presented as an affordable option, with Mistral stating it is “less than half the price” of comparable solutions available in the market.
Voxtral can transcribe up to 30 minutes of audio. Leveraging its LLM backbone, Mistral Small 3.1, the model can comprehend up to 40 minutes of audio content. This capability allows users to query audio content, generate summaries, and trigger real-time actions such as API calls or function executions through voice commands. Voxtral also supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Dutch, and Italian, for both transcription and comprehension.
Mistral offers two variants of its speech understanding models. Voxtral Small, designed for production-scale deployments, features 24 billion parameters. It is positioned as competitive with models such as ElevenLabs Scribe, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini 2.5 Flash. The second variant, Voxtral Mini, contains 3 billion parameters and is optimized for local and edge deployments. Additionally, an optimized API version of the 3-billion-parameter model, named Voxtral Mini Transcribe, focuses on transcription-only use cases. This variant is promoted as outperforming OpenAI Whisper at less than half the cost.
Users can access Voxtral for free by downloading its API on Hugging Face or by testing the models within Mistral’s chatbot, Le Chat. Integrating the API into applications starts at a rate of $0.001 per minute. This launch follows Mistral’s announcement last month of Magistral, its first family of reasoning models designed for improved reliability through step-by-step problem-solving. Mistral, a prominent European AI firm known for advocating open-source AI models, is reportedly in discussions to raise up to $1 billion in equity from investors, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, as reported by TechCrunch earlier this month.
