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Mistral releases Voxtral, its first open source AI audio model
French startup Mistral has jumped into the audio race with Voxtral, its first open model, aiming to challenge the dominance of walled-off corporate systems with open-weight alternatives.
Due to its LLM backbone, Mistral Small 3.1, 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. There’s also an ultra-cheap, stripped-down, fast API version of the 3B 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. Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch, where she covers Tesla and Elon Musk’s broader empire, autonomy, AI, electrification, gig work platforms, Big Tech regulatory scrutiny, and more.
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