October 21, 2026 issue

Story 02 October 21, 2026 issue

Daily AI-generated issue

Mistral ships Voxtral 3 voice agents from $0.04 per minute

Image: mistral.ai

Top News · 574 HN points

Voxtral 3 combines transcription, speech generation, and a voice-agent SDK. Its voice-agent API starts at $0.04 per minute. Mistral says the Small transcription model outperforms Whisper, Scribe v2, and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe.

Here's what you can build with it:

  • The LiveKit-based SDK streams transcription, reasoning, tool calls, and speech generation rather than waiting for each stage to finish. Callers can interrupt the agent.
  • SIP connects phone calls, while WebRTC supports browser and app experiences. Agents can use function calling, web search, and retrieval over your systems.
  • Batch transcription costs $0.0035 per minute for the 4B Mini model and $0.0040 for Small. Realtime Mini transcription costs $0.008 per minute.

One catch: the $0.04-per-minute agent price requires Mistral Small 4 for reasoning. Using another reasoning model costs $0.08 per minute.

Try it: Use the Mistral API or Studio playgrounds for voice agents, transcription, speech generation, and voice cloning.

Sources: mistral.ai

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