# Mistral Voxtral

69 Hacker News commenters recommended Mistral Voxtral and 27 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend Voxtral for fast, accurate transcription of jargon, rap and mixed-language speech at a low price. Critics most often report wrong-language output, such as Ukrainian turned into Russian.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles fast speech and jargon (3 comments): "I read various papers full of jargon at high speed, and it is stunning." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890724)) "I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46887747)) "Seems to understand/infer all the technobabble I use at work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895735))
- Good multilingual and code-switching (4 comments): "I tried speaking in 2 languages at once, and it picked it up correctly. Truly impressive for real-time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46893223)) "It did great English and Spanish, it didn't switch to Portuguese, french nor German" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890566)) "In my tests with other languages Voxtral was better then Whisper." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478139))
- Strong real-time streaming output (3 comments): "I tried speaking in 2 languages at once, and it picked it up correctly. Truly impressive for real-time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46893223)) "the UX difference between streaming and offline STT is night and day" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149479)) "you see text appearing while you're still mid-sentence" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138004))
- Good value compared to rivals (3 comments): "their new model is good and half the price if you can live without streaming" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041382)) "I've found Voxtral to be the best combination of price/speed/accuracy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201657)) "This exciting, especially after 11 labs very expensive model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896659))

## What people warn about

- Defaults to wrong language sometimes (3 comments): "But talk to it in Polish, and suddenly it thinks you speak Russian?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889692)) "it could not recognise my Ukrainian and would default to Russian in absolutely ridiculous transcription" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890239)) "if I try speaking Ukrainian, I'm getting transcript in Russian every time. That's upsetting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890267))
- Weak accuracy in non-English languages (4 comments): "The language support is a little lacking for my use cases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896322)) "Translation is atrocious, and sometimes incorrect, in the part where they showcase their 35-language pronunciations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50173251)) "their multilingual performance in general has usually been below average" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892789))
- Closed model, not open source (2 comments): "First of all, this is great for sovereignty. Sad that the model is not open." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172293)) "Closed model unfortunately, continues the theme of TTS / STT being really not great for local deployments." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168830))
- Slow on long audio files (2 comments): "In the api it took 18s to do a 20m audio file I had lying around where someone is reviewing a product." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891409)) "I have to wait 10 minutes at a time for the 2+ hour long transcriptions I've uploaded to Voxstral to process" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112272))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenAI Whisper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper.md): 164 recommend
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/parakeet.md): 144 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
- [Transcribe.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/transcribe-cpp.md): 21 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://mistral.ai/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Mistral Voxtral", https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-transcribe-2/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).