Voxtral
Speech understanding model by Mistral AI for transcription and analysis.
About
Voxtral is Mistral AI's entry into speech, a pair of models that combine transcription with genuine audio understanding rather than stopping at speech-to-text. Because the models are built on a Mistral Small 3.1 language backbone, they can answer questions about a recording, summarize it, or trigger function calls directly from spoken intent without chaining a separate ASR system into an LLM. The lineup includes Voxtral at 24B parameters for production deployments and Voxtral Mini at 3B for local and edge use, both released as open weights under Apache 2.0 and also served through Mistral's API. A 32,000 token context window handles audio around 30 to 40 minutes long, and language detection is automatic across English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Dutch, Italian, and others, with transcription accuracy Mistral reports as competitive with or ahead of Whisper. Developers building voice agents and enterprises that want private, self-hosted speech intelligence are the intended audience.
Should you use Voxtral?
Pick it when
Pick Voxtral when you want a system to understand recordings, answering questions, summarizing, or triggering function calls from speech without chaining ASR into a separate LLM, with Mini at 3B locally or 24B in production.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you only need transcripts, where Granite Speech or Qwen3-ASR are far smaller to run, or for recordings past about 40 minutes, which exceed its 32,000 token context without chunking.
Alternatives to Voxtral
- Granite Speech
Also LLM-based with prompts and translation, but a 2B model that runs on modest hardware and took a top spot on the Open ASR Leaderboard.
- Kimi-Audio
7B audio model adding sound classification and end-to-end speech conversation, wider scope than Voxtral's text output, but no small variant like the 3B Voxtral Mini.
- Whisper
Pure transcription and translation across about 99 languages, far lighter, but you need a separate LLM for summaries or Q&A.
- Qwen3-ASR
Sub-2B transcription with streaming and 22 Chinese dialects, the leaner choice when you need text rather than audio understanding.
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Details
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- Minimum VRAM
- 8 GB
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026