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As AI systems become more capable, speech is fast becoming the default way we communicate with machines. French AI startup Mistral<\/a> has jumped into the audio race with its first open model, aiming to challenge the dominance of walled-off corporate systems with open-weight alternatives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Mistral announced the release of Voxtral, its first family of audio models aimed at businesses. <\/p>\n The company is pitching Voxtral as the first open model that\u2019s capable of deploying \u201ctruly usable speech intelligence in production.\u201d <\/p>\n In other words, no longer will developers have to choose between a cheap, open system that fumbles transcriptions and doesn\u2019t really understand what\u2019s being said, and one that functions well, but is closed, leaving developers with a higher bill and less control over deployment.\u00a0<\/p>\n For businesses, that means Voxtral offers an affordable alternative that the company claims is \u201cless than half the price\u201d of comparable solutions.<\/p>\n Mistral says Voxtral can transcribe up to 30 minutes of audio. Due to its LLM backbone, Mistral Small 3.1<\/a>, it can understand up to 40 minutes, allowing users to ask questions about the audio content, generate summaries, or turn voice commands into real-time actions like calling APIs or running functions. Voxtral is also multilingual, with the ability to transcribe and understand languages including English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Dutch, and Italian. <\/p>\n The company is offering up two variants of its \u201cspeech understanding models.\u201d The first, Voxtral Small, has 24 billion parameters for production-scale deployments, and is competitive with ElevenLabs Scribe, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini 2.5 Flash.\u00a0<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> The second, Voxtral Mini, has 3 billion parameters for local and edge deployments. There\u2019s also an ultra-cheap, stripped-down, fast API version of the 3 billion model called Voxtral Mini Transcribe that is optimized for transcription-only use cases and promises to outperform OpenAI Whisper for less than half the price.<\/p>\n Users can try Voxtral for free by downloading the API on Hugging Face or testing the models in Mistral\u2019s chatbot Le Chat. Integrating the API into applications starts at $0.001 per minute, according to the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n The launch comes a month after Mistral announced Magistral<\/a>, its first family of reasoning models that work through problems step-by-step for improved reliability.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mistral, one of the top AI firms in Europe, is well-known for its advocacy pushing open source AI models. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that the company is in talks to raise up to $1 billion in equity<\/a> from investors like Abu Dhabi\u2019s MGX fund.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n