Mistral AI Releases Voxtral: Apache 2.0 Speech Models with 32K Token Context at $0.001/Minute

Mistral AI released Voxtral, a family of open-source speech understanding models available in 24B and 3B parameter variants. Both models are released under Apache 2.0 license and available via API starting at $0.001 per minute.

Technical Specifications

Voxtral comes in two versions:

• Voxtral Small (24B): Production-scale applications
• Voxtral Mini (3B): Local and edge deployments

Both models support 32K token context length, handling up to 30 minutes of audio for transcription or 40 minutes for understanding tasks. The API uses Voxtral Mini Transcribe, an optimized transcription variant.

Core Capabilities

The models include built-in Q&A and summarization without requiring separate ASR and language model chains. Voxtral supports native multilingual processing with automatic language detection across English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Dutch, and Italian.

Voxtral enables function-calling directly from voice input, allowing systems to trigger backend functions or API calls based on spoken commands without intermediate parsing. The models retain the text understanding capabilities of their Mistral Small 3.1 language model backbone.

Benchmark Performance

According to Mistral AI, Voxtral outperforms Whisper large-v3 across all tested transcription tasks. The company claims Voxtral Small beats GPT-4o mini Transcribe and Gemini 2.5 Flash on all evaluated tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results on English short-form benchmarks and Mozilla Common Voice.

On the FLEURS multilingual benchmark, Mistral reports Voxtral Small surpasses Whisper on every language task, with particular strength in European languages. For audio understanding tasks, the company states Voxtral Small is competitive with GPT-4o-mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash, claiming state-of-the-art performance in speech translation.

Word error rates were measured across LibriSpeech, GigaSpeech, VoxPopuli, Switchboard, CHiME-4, SPGISpeech, and Earnings-21/22 datasets for English, plus Mozilla Common Voice 15.1 and FLEURS for multilingual evaluation.

Pricing and Availability

Mistral claims Voxtral Mini Transcribe outperforms OpenAI Whisper at less than half the price, while Voxtral Small matches ElevenLabs Scribe performance at less than half the cost. API pricing starts at $0.001 per minute.

Both models are available for download on Hugging Face. Voxtral will be integrated into Le Chat's voice mode over the coming weeks.

Enterprise Features

Mistral offers private deployment options for production-scale inference within customer infrastructure, including multi-GPU configurations and quantized builds. The company provides domain-specific fine-tuning services for legal, medical, and customer support applications.

Mistral is developing additional features including speaker segmentation, emotion detection, word-level timestamps, and non-speech audio recognition.

What This Means

Voxtral represents the first production-grade, open-source speech model with competitive benchmark performance against proprietary systems. The Apache 2.0 license and $0.001/minute pricing could significantly lower barriers for developers building voice-enabled applications, particularly in regulated industries requiring on-premises deployment. The 32K token context window addresses a key limitation in current open-source ASR systems for long-form audio processing.