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 applicationsMistral 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, …
