Mistral drops Voxtral Transcribe 2, an open-source speech model that runs on-device for pennies

Mistral AI, the Paris-based startup positioning itself as Europe's answer to OpenAI, released a pair of speech-to-text models on Wednesday that the company says can transcribe audio faster, more accurately, and far more cheaply than anything else on the market — all while running entirely on a smartphone or laptop.

The announcement marks the latest salvo in an increasingly competitive battle over voice AI, a technology that enterprise customers see as essential for everything from automated customer service to real-time translation. But unlike offerings from American tech giants, Mistral's new Voxtral Transcribe 2 models are designed to process sensitive audio without ever transmitting it to remote servers — a feature that could prove decisive for companies in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and defense.

"You'd like your voice and the transcription of your voice to stay close to where you are, meaning you want it to happen on device—on a laptop, a phone, or a smartwatch," Pierre Stock, Mistral's vice president of science operations, said in an interview with VentureBeat. "We make that possible because the model is only 4 billion parameters. It's small enough to fit almost anywhere."

Mistral splits its new AI transcription technology into batch processing and real-time applications

Mistral released two distinct models under the Voxtral Transcribe 2 banner, each engineered for different use cases.

• Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 handles batch transcription, processing pre-recorded audio files in bulk. The company says it achieves the lowest word error rate of any transcription service and is available via API at $0.003 per minute, roughly one-fifth the price of major competitors. The model supports 13 languages, including English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, and several European languages.

• Voxtral Realtime, as its name suggests, processes live audio with a latency that can be configured down to 200 milliseconds — the blink of an eye. Mistral claims this is a breakthrough for applications where even a two-second delay proves unacceptable: live subtitling, voice agents, and real-time customer service augmentation.

The Realtime model ships under an Apache 2.0 open-source license, meaning developers can download the model weights from Hugging Face, modify them, and deploy them without paying Mistral a licensing fee. For companies that prefer not to run their own infrastructure, API access costs $0.006 per minute.

Stock said Mistral is betting on the open-source community to expand the model's reach. "The open-source community is very imaginative when it comes to applications," he said. "We're excited to see what they're going to do."

Why on-device AI processing matters for enterprises handling sensitive data

The decision to engineer models small enough to run locally reflects a calculation about where the enterprise market is heading. As companies integrate AI into ever more sensitive workflows — transcribing medical consultations, financial advisory calls, legal depositions — the question of where that data travels has become a dealbreaker.

Stock painted a vivid picture of the problem during his interview. Current note-taking applications with audio capabilities, he explained, often pick up ambient noise in problematic ways: "It might pick up the lyrics of the music in the background. It might pick up another conversation. It might hallucinate from a background noise."

Mistral invested heavily in training data curation and model architecture to address these issues. "All of that, we spend a lot of time ironing out the data and the way we train the model to robustify it," Stock said.

The company also added enterprise-specific features that its American competitors have been slower to implement. Context biasing allows customers to upload a list of specialized terminology — medical jargon, proprietary product names, industry acronyms — and the model will automatically favor those terms when transcribing ambiguous audio. Unlike fine-tuning, which requires retraining the model, context biasing works through a simple API parameter.

"You only need a text list," Stock explained. "And then the model will automatically bias the transcription toward these acronyms or these weird words. And it's zero shots, no need for retraining, no need for weird stuff."

From factory floors to call centers, Mistral targets high-noise industrial environments

Stock described two scenarios that capture how Mistral envisions the technology being deployed.

The first involves industrial auditing. Imagine technicians walking through a manufacturing facility, inspecting heavy machinery while shouting observations over the din of factory noise. "In the end, imagine like a perfect timestamped notes identifying who said what — so diarization — while being super robust," Stock said. The challenge is handling what he called "weird technical language that no one is able to spell except these people."

The second scenario targets customer service operations. When a caller contacts a support center, Voxtral Realtime can transcribe the conversation in real time, feeding text to backend systems that pull up relevant customer records before the caller finishes explaining the problem.

"The status will appear for the operator on the screen before the customer stops the sentence and stops complaining," Stock explained. "Which means you can just interact and say, 'Okay, I can see the status. Let me correct the address and send back the shipment.'"

He estimated this could reduce typical customer service interactions from multiple back-and-forth exchanges to just two interactions: the customer explains the problem, and the agent resolves it immediately.

Real-time translation across languages could arrive by the end of 2026

For all the focus on transcription, Stock made clear that Mistral views these models as foundational technology for a more ambitious goal: real-time speech-to-speech translation that feels natural.

"Maybe the end goal application and what the model is laying the groundwork for is live translation," he said. "I speak French, you speak English. It's key to have minimal latency, because otherwise you don't build empathy. Your face is not out of sync with what you said one second ago."

That goal puts Mistral in direct competition with Apple and Google, both of which have been racing to solve the same problem. Google's latest translation model operates at a two-second delay — ten times slower than what Mistral claims for Voxtral Realtime.

Mistral positions itself as the privacy-first alternative for enterprise customers

Mistral occupies an unusual position in the AI landscape. Founded in 2023 by alumni of Meta and Google DeepMind, the company has raised over $2 billion and now carries a valuation of approximately $13.6 billion. Yet it operates with a fraction of the compute resources available to American hyperscalers — and has built its strategy around efficiency rather than brute force.

"The models we release are enterprise grade, industry leading, efficient — in particular, in terms of cost — can be embedded into the edge, unlocks privacy, unlocks control, transparency," Stock said.

That approach has resonated particularly with European customers wary of dependence on American technology. In January, France's Ministry of the Armed Forces signed a framework agreement giving the country's military access to Mistral's AI models—a deal that explicitly requires deployment on French-controlled infrastructure.

"I think a big barrier to adoption of voice AI is that, hey, if you're in a sensitive industry like finance or in manufacturing or healthcare or insurance, you can't have information you're talking about just go to the cloud," Howard Cohen, who participated in the interview alongside Stock, noted. "It needs to be either on device or needs to be on your premise."

Mistral faces stiff competition from OpenAI, Google, and a rising China

The transcription market has grown fiercely competitive. OpenAI's Whisper model has become something of an industry standard, available both through API and as downloadable open-source weights. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all offer enterprise-grade speech services. Specialized players like Assembly AI and Deepgram have built substantial businesses serving developers who need reliable, scalable transcription.

Mistral claims its new models outperform all of them on accuracy benchmarks while undercutting them on price. "We are better than them on the benchmarks," Stock said. Independent verification of those claims will take time, but the company points to performance on FLEURS, a widely used multilingual speech benchmark, where Voxtral models achieve word error rates competitive with or superior to alternatives from OpenAI and Google.

Perhaps more significantly, Mistral's CEO Arthur Mensch has warned that American AI companies face pressure from an unexpected direction. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Mensch dismissed the notion that Chinese AI lags behind the West as "a fairy tale."

"The capabilities of China's open-source technology is probably stressing the CEOs in the US," he said.

The French startup bets that trust will determine the winner in enterprise voice AI

Stock predicted that 2026 would be "the year of note-taking" — the moment when AI transcription becomes reliable enough that users trust it completely.

"You need to trust the model, and the model basically cannot make any mistake, otherwise you would just lose trust in the product and stop using it," he said. "The threshold is super, super hard."

Whether Mistral has crossed that threshold remains to be seen. Enterprise customers will be the ultimate judges, and they tend to move slowly, testing claims against reality before committing budgets and workflows to new technology. The audio playground in Mistral Studio, where developers can test Voxtral Transcribe 2 with their own files, went live today.

But Stock's broader argument deserves attention. In a market where American giants compete by throwing billions of dollars at ever-larger models, Mistral is making a different wager: that in the age of AI, smaller and local might beat bigger and distant. For the executives who spend their days worrying about data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and vendor lock-in, that pitch may prove more compelling than any benchmark.

The race to dominate enterprise voice AI is no longer just about who builds the most powerful model. It's about who builds the model you're willing to let listen.