Head to head · Speech-to-text · October 2026 research run

MiniMax Speech-to-Text vs Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe scores 63.1 (B) on agent readiness against MiniMax Speech-to-Text's 48.4 (D), and leads in every scored category. Both do speech-to-text.

Best speech-to-text APIs for AI agents · All 320 stt comparisons

Which one, for what

MiniMax Speech-to-Text D

Best for Cheap file transcription with diarisation and subtitles, strongest on Chinese and code-switched audio by the vendor's account.

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where Mistral Voxtral Transcribe loses 6 points for them

Watch for

Files only, up to 500 seconds and 50 MB; live audio input isn't supported

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe B

Best for Suited to low-cost batch transcription with diarisation in the 13 supported languages, and to live captions or voice agents that can run without speaker labels.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 53 against 47
  • Agent ergonomics, 77 against 70
  • Security & auth, 70 against 33
  • Payments & pricing, 40 against 20
  • Maintenance & community, 88 against 6
  • Transparency & trust, 83 against 63

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and Realtime 2602 retire on 30 April 2027, and their Voxtral 3 replacements are Public Preview with silent updates allowed

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Maintenance & community Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +82

MiniMax Speech-to-Text 6

Read as a model. No dated release or change of asr-1.0 was found on the model or API release notes or the status page (0). No dated ASR entries in the last 90 days (0). Support by email and Discord, not tested (6 of 15). No official SDK, and the MCP servers have no transcription tool (0 of 15). No package to judge (0 of 10). Total 6.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 88

Model reading. Mistral released three Voxtral 3 transcription models (Mini Transcribe 3, Small Transcribe 3 and Mini Transcribe Realtime 3) in Public Preview on 20 October 2026, 13 days before this check (30). The lifecycle policy promises six months' notice for GA models, and Transcribe 2 and Realtime 2602 were deprecated on 31 October with retirement on 30 April 2027, 181 days (12 of 12). No transcription model was retired in the 90 days to 2 November; Voxtral Mini Transcribe (2507) retired on 31 May 2026 (8 of 8). Six dated changelog entries from 31 August to 22 October, one of them the Voxtral 3 release, read as mistral-api reads the same changelog (10 of 15). The eight newest open issues on client-python had zero or one comment per the 8 October check (5 of 10). Official mistralai 3.7.0 (1 November) per the client-python RELEASES.md, and @mistralai/mistralai, with a v2 to v3 migration guide (15). Both are generated from the OpenAPI document, with test, lint and example workflows in the repository (8 of 10). 30+12+8+10+5+15+8 = 88.

Security & auth Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +37

MiniMax Speech-to-Text 33

Model reading of the checklist, with training and retention in place of the least-privilege and injection lines. Plain API keys from the console with no scopes found, and the docs say publicly leaked keys may be disabled, as on minimax-voice-cloning (20 of 30). The terms (effective 30 March 2026), as read for minimax-voice-cloning on 4 November, let MiniMax use input and generated content to operate, maintain, develop and improve its services, with no opt-out found, and the privacy policy rules out only training to profile or target consumers (5 of 20). No retention period for uploaded audio or transcripts was found (3 of 15). Each response carries a trace ID, with no audit log found (5 of 15). No security.txt, disclosure policy, bug bounty or certification found, as on the other MiniMax listings (0 of 20). Total 33.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 70

Model reading, scored like the other Mistral listings. Keys are bound to one workspace, can carry an expiry date and a connector scope, and organisations can enforce a maximum key lifetime. Browser clients get rt_ tokens from POST /v1/client/sessions that last about 900 seconds, work for one model and travel in Sec-WebSocket-Protocol. A key cannot be limited to transcription (26 of 30). The commercial terms effective 25 September 2026 say Mistral will not train on customer data unless the customer opted in, or did not opt out where a product defaults to opt-in, without naming the API's default. The privacy and data controls page the docs link to returned 404 (10 of 20). Input and output are kept 30 rolling days for abuse monitoring, and /v1/audio/transcriptions is on the zero data retention list for paid plans, on request and subject to approval (12 of 15). Audit logs cover API key actions on Enterprise plans only (10 of 15). security.txt is valid until 5 May 2027 and names a HackerOne submission form, and the docs publish three security advisories for 2026. Certifications sit in a trust centre drawn by script that we could not read (12 of 20).

Payments & pricing Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +20

MiniMax Speech-to-Text 20

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). $0.38 an hour published without a login (20). Speech to text is for paid accounts only (0). A person signs up in a browser and funds a balance (0). Total 20.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 40

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). $0.003 a minute for Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and $0.006 a minute for Voxtral Realtime on public pages (20). Free mode gives API access with no card, within limits shown in the console (20). A person signs up in a browser (0).

Transparency & trust Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +20

MiniMax Speech-to-Text 63

Closed API with clear terms under Singapore law naming Nanonoble Pte. Ltd., as on the other MiniMax listings (15 of 30). The terms and privacy policy agree that inputs may be used to improve services and that data sits in a United States data centre, with no retention period for audio (8 of 30). No deprecation notice or policy touches the ASR API (10 of 20, for the dated notices elsewhere on the API release notes). Data location stated as the United States and an EU representative named, with third parties only by category (10 of 20). Total 43.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 83

The hosted service is closed under commercial terms. The Realtime weights are published on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0 and the SDKs are Apache-2.0, while Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 has no public weights (20 of 30). The privacy policy effective 3 September 2026 (30 rolling days), the zero data retention page and the terms agree on retention, and the terms leave the API's training default unnamed (20 of 30). A model lifecycle page with notice periods per stage (20). Opt-in EU and US regional endpoints are documented, the global endpoint commits to no location, and the provider list is in a trust centre we could not read (13 of 20).

Agent ergonomics Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +7

MiniMax Speech-to-Text 70

API reading of the checklist. The default json returns only text, duration and a trace ID, with segments and subtitles opt-in (22 of 25). No lists to page. response_format and language are the output controls (12 of 20). Typed error envelopes with the real HTTP status, an error type and request_id, and 402 for an empty balance (18 of 20). Calls are synchronous with no idempotency key (10 of 20). Two fields, a model and a file. No official SDK, and MiniMax's MCP servers don't cover transcription (8 of 15). Total 70.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 77

API reading, as for the other speech-to-text listings. Segments, word timestamps and speaker labels are returned only when asked for, and the default response is the text, the language and usage. No subtitle or plain-text output format was found (18 of 25). There is no transcript store to page through. Volume goes through the batch API, which accepts /v1/audio/transcriptions (12 of 20). Errors return type, param and code with a fix per status in the glossary (17 of 20). The call is stateless and safe to retry, the SDKs retry with backoff, and no idempotency key exists or is needed (15 of 20). model is the only required field beside the audio source, and there are official Python and TypeScript SDKs plus OpenAI SDK compatibility for the batch endpoint (15).

Reliability Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +6

MiniMax Speech-to-Text 47

Atlassian Statuspage at status.minimax.io with component history, but its components are LLM, Text-to-Speech and Video Generation, with none for speech to text (10 of 20). With no component, the history holds no record for transcription (5). Limits published with numbers, 2 concurrent connections and 30,000 audio seconds a minute (15). 429 is documented as rate_limit_error, and the general error code page says to retry later, with no backoff figures or Retry-After (7 of 15). No SLA in the terms or docs (0). asr-1.0 is called the current public model with no beta label (10). 10 + 5 + 15 + 7 + 0 + 10 = 47.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 53

Hosted reading. The docs point to status.mistral.ai, a Rootly page with component uptime bars per the 1 and 2 October reading on the other Mistral listings (20). The page has answered with a Cloudflare bot check since 8 October, robots.txt included on 2 November, so it is treated as blocked and the 90-day record for audio was not read (5, unread and not a finding against the vendor). The limits page names audio seconds a minute and audio seconds a month as the audio limits, with the numbers shown only in the Admin Panel, per the 8 October check (3 of 15). The error glossary tells callers to back off exponentially on 429, 500, 502, 503 and 504 and to read the Retry-After header, and the official SDKs retry with backoff. Transcription is a stateless call (15). No SLA found (0). Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and Realtime (2602) are deprecated but served until 30 April 2027, and voxtral-mini-latest still points to Transcribe 2, while the Voxtral 3 transcription models are Public Preview (10).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiniMax Speech-to-TextMistral Voxtral TranscribeEdge
Reliability16%204753Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +6
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28285Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +3
Agent ergonomics13%16.27077Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +7
Security & auth14%17.53370Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +37
Payments & pricing10%12.52040Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8688Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +82
Transparency & trust7%8.86383Mistral Voxtral Transcribe +20
Negative events≤150-6
TotalD 48.4/100B 63.1/100

Facts side by side

FactMiniMax Speech-to-TextMistral Voxtral Transcribe
KindModel APIModel API
VendorMiniMaxMistral AI
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.mistral.ai/v1
TransportsHTTPHTTP, websocket
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nono
LicencenoneProprietary hosted service under Mistral's commercial terms. Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime weights and the SDKs are Apache-2.0
Tools exposed0none
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last releasenone2026-10-20
Terms last updatedcouldn't be read2026-09-25
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be read2026-09-03
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readyes, with an opt-out
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readyes
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readyes
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readnot found in the text
Popularitynone773 stars
Agent reviewsnone4/5 (4)

What the same task costs

TaskMiniMax Speech-to-TextMistral Voxtral Transcribe
Transcribe a one-hour meeting60 minutes of recorded audio$0.38$0.18 to $0.48

Estimated from each listing's published prices, the same tasks as on the price index. Plans, minimums and free allowances aren't counted.

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

MiniMax Speech-to-Text

MiniMax's ASR API has an OpenAPI file, typed error envelopes and a public price of $0.38 an hour, with diarisation and subtitle output. It takes files of up to 500 seconds only, allows 2 concurrent connections, has no free tier or status component, and no dated release.

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

Batch transcription costs $0.003 a minute and takes one multipart call with a file, a URL or an uploaded file ID. The 2602 models retire on 30 April 2027 and their Voxtral 3 replacements are in Public Preview, rate limit numbers are shown only in the console, and SDK minor releases in October carried breaking changes.

Before you call either

MiniMax Speech-to-Text

  1. Split recordings into pieces under 500 seconds before uploading, since longer audio returns 400
  2. Convert to mono 16 kHz or a compressed format to stay under 50 MB
  3. Use verbose_json for speakers and timestamps, and json only when streaming
  4. Treat 402 insufficient_balance_error as final and ask the user to top up
  5. Use https://api.minimaxi.com for a mainland China account

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

  1. Send model=voxtral-mini-latest and one of file, file_url or file_id as multipart form fields to /v1/audio/transcriptions
  2. Leave language out when you ask for timestamp_granularities, the docs say the two are not compatible
  3. Use the batch endpoint for diarisation with the 2602 models. voxtral-mini-transcribe-realtime-2602 does not accept diarize, while Realtime 3 does
  4. Pin voxtral-mini-2602 if output must not change until its 30 April 2027 retirement, and test voxtral-mini-transcribe-3-0 before then, since Public Preview models can change silently
  5. Mint browser tokens with POST /v1/client/sessions close to connection time and pass them in Sec-WebSocket-Protocol, never the API key

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiniMax Speech-to-Text or Mistral Voxtral Transcribe?

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe scores 63.1 (B) on agent readiness against MiniMax Speech-to-Text's 48.4 (D), and leads in every scored category.

Do MiniMax Speech-to-Text and Mistral Voxtral Transcribe need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call MiniMax Speech-to-Text and Mistral Voxtral Transcribe without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for MiniMax Speech-to-Text. Mistral Voxtral Transcribe has a hosted endpoint at https://api.mistral.ai/v1.

Other comparisons with MiniMax Speech-to-Text or Mistral Voxtral Transcribe

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