# Mistral Voxtral Mini

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Mistral Voxtral Mini and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for accurate speech-to-text that is also cheap to run, either locally or through the API. One critic noted that the API price rose from 0.003 to 0.0035 dollars.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong transcription quality across tests (2 comments): "Out of all the STT models I've tried, it's both the best performing and one of the cheapest!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48741177)) "I personally switched to it as my main default fast model - it's really good." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936537))
- Very low usage costs (2 comments): "Out of all the STT models I've tried, it's both the best performing and one of the cheapest!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48741177)) "the costs of usage are very low" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911644))
- Runs locally or via API (2 comments): "voxtral for local overnight batch runs and voxtral via api for more expedient use cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476876)) "The only local model that satisfies me is Voxtral Mini 3b" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471856))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenAI Whisper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper.md): 164 recommend
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/parakeet.md): 144 recommend
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-transcribe-2.md): 69 recommend
- [Moonshine open-weights STT models](https://hackerapproved.com/p/moonshine.md): 37 recommend
- [whisper.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper-cpp.md): 33 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Mistral Voxtral Mini", https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-mini-3b/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).