“Too many GPUs makes you lazy,” says the French startup’s vice president of science operations, as the company carves out a different path than the major US AI companies.

The Paris-based AI lab released two new speech-to-text models: Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime. The former is built to transcribe audio files in large batches and the latter for nearly real-time transcription, within 200 milliseconds; both can translate between 13 languages. Voxtral Realtime is freely available under an open source license.

At 4 billion parameters, the models are small enough to run locally on a phone or laptop—a first in the speech-to-text field, Mistral claims—meaning that private conversations needn’t be dispatched to the cloud. According to Mistral, the new models are both cheaper to run and less error-prone than competing alternatives.