150

Voxtral – Frontier open source speech understanding models

Running Voxtral-Mini-3B-2507 on GPU requires ~9.5 GB of GPU RAM in bf16 or fp16.

Running Voxtral-Small-24B-2507 on GPU requires ~55 GB of GPU RAM in bf16 or fp16.

5 days agohomarp

24B is crazy expensive for speech transcription. Conspicuously no comparison with Parakeet, a 600M param model thats currently dominating leaderboards (but only for English)

4 days agoipsum2

But it also includes world knowledge, can do tool calls, etc. It’s an omnimodel

4 days agoazinman2

Only the mini is meant for pure transcription. And with the tests I just did on their API, comparing to Whisper large, they are around three times faster, more accurate and cheaper.

24B is, as sibling comment says, an omni model, it can also do function calling.

3 days agoqwertox

Im pretty excited to play around with this. I’ve worked with whisper quite a bit, it’s awesome to have another model in the same class and from Mistral, who tend to be very open. I’m sure unsloth is already working on some GGUF quants - will probably spin it up tomorrow and try it on some audio.

4 days agokamranjon

Does it support realtime transcription? What is the ~latency?

5 days agolostmsu

Unlikely. The small model is much larger than whisper (which is already hard to use for realtime)

4 days agorolisz

In demo they mention polish prononcuation is pretty bad, spoken as if second language of english-native speaker. I wonder if it's the same for other languages. On the other hand whispering-english is hillariously good, especially different emotions.

4 days agosheerun

It is insane how good the "French man speaking English" demo is. It captures a lot of subtleties

4 days agoRaed667

That’s an actual French man speaking English

3 days agopotlee

My Whisper v3 Large Turbo is $0.001/min, so their price comparison is not exactly perfect.

5 days agolostmsu

How did you achieve that? I was looking into it and $0.006/min is quoted everywhere.

5 days agoImageXav

Harvesting idle compute. https://borgcloud.org/speech-to-text

5 days agolostmsu

Do you support speaker recognition?

4 days agoBetterWhisper

No. I found models doing that unreliable when there are many speakers.

4 days agolostmsu

This is your service?

4 days ago4b11b4

Yes

4 days agolostmsu

They claim to undercut competitors of similar quality by half for both models, yet they released both as Apache 2.0 instead of following smaller - open, larger - closed strategy used for their last releases. What's different here?

5 days agodanelski

They didn't release voxtral large so your question doesn't really make sense

4 days agohalJordan

It's about what their top offering is at the moment, not having Large in name. Mistral Medium 3 is notably not Mistral Large 3, but it was released as API-only.

4 days agodanelski

They're working on a bunch of features so maybe those will be closed. I guess they're feeling generous on the base model.

4 days agowmf

Probably not looking to directly compete in transcription space

4 days agoHavoc