Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound (via) Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 – a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025.
Voxtral Realtime – official name Voxtral-Mini-4B-Realtime-2602 – is the open weights (Apache-2.0) model, available as a 8.87GB download from Hugging Face.
You can try it out in this live demo – don’t be put off by the “No microphone found” message, clicking “Record” should have your browser request permission and then start the demo working. I was very impressed by the demo – I talked quickly and used jargon like Django and WebAssembly and it correctly transcribed my text within moments of me uttering each sound.
The closed weight model is called voxtral-mini-latest and can be accessed via the Mistral API, using calls that look something like this:
curl -X POST "https://api.mistral.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MISTRAL_API_KEY" \
-F model="voxtral-mini-latest" \
-F file=@"Pelican talk at the library.m4a" \
-F diarize=true \
-F context_bias="Datasette" \
-F timestamp_granularities="segment"
It’s priced at $0.003/minute, which is $0.18/hour.
The Mistral API console now has a speech-to-text playground for exercising the new model and it is excellent. You can upload an audio file and promptly get a diarized transcript in a pleasant interface, with options to download the result in text, SRT or JSON format.
