Head-to-head comparison based on real production benchmarks with Gulf Arabic callers.
Fast Whisper inference on Groq hardware — poor Arabic quality with inconsistent latency.
Mistral's speech model — completely non-functional for Arabic.
Described as 'horrible' transcription quality for Arabic in production testing.
Produced zero transcriptions for Arabic audio. Tested with and without explicit language parameter.
| Feature | Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo | Mistral Voxtral Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware-accelerated inference | ✓ | ✗ |
| Whisper model compatibility | ✓ | ✗ |
| Batch and real-time modes | ✓ | ✗ |
| Multilingual speech recognition (claimed) | ✗ | ✓ |
| Audio understanding | ✗ | ✓ |
| Capability | Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo | Mistral Voxtral Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Streaming support | ✗ | ✗ |
| LiveKit plugin | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✗ | ✗ |
| API style | REST (OpenAI-compatible) | REST |
| SDKs | Python, Node.js | Python, Node.js |
Groq's fast hardware can't compensate for Whisper's poor Arabic handling. Quality is unacceptable and latency is too inconsistent for voice agents.
Does not work for Arabic at all. Zero transcriptions produced in testing despite claiming multilingual support.
Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo has a quality rating of 1/5 (Poor). Described as 'horrible' transcription quality for Arabic in production testing.
Both providers are viable options. Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo: Groq's fast hardware can't compensate for Whisper's poor Arabic handling. Quality is unacceptable and latency is too inconsistent for voice agents. Mistral Voxtral Mini: Does not work for Arabic at all. Zero transcriptions produced in testing despite claiming multilingual support.
Groq Whisper Large v3 Turbo starts at $0 per minute (Rate-limited free tier). Mistral Voxtral Mini starts at Usage-based per request (Mistral API pricing).