Comment by SyneRyder
9 hours ago
I used to use Mistral OCR, but found it was better just to write a program that sent the documents to Claude Sonnet to OCR instead. Claude is far better quality, better formatting and fewer errors.
I'm also using Voxtral TTS to try to replace OpenAI. It "works", but I've had problems with volume levels being radically different between different audio chunks. It doesn't seem to "understand the full text" the way OpenAI's voice models do, which can be more expressive. Voxtral sometimes sounds robotic in the reading. And some Voxtral TTS output contains music in the background occasionally, which suggests their training corpus isn't that clean. Try generating a personalized news podcast, and the intro may occasionally sound like the music for BBC News underneath....
As for not focusing on AI, there's this interview in the Big Technology Podcast 2 months ago, where the Mistral CEO says their main focus is on helping companies fine-train models for internal use, over being a general model builder.
"I sent money to the god knows how many trillion parameters fully closed source machine built on billions of dollars and it worked better than the model that I can self host from the guys next door"
yeah, no shit ? All you're saying is that you're happily locking yourself in to models you have zero control over and that Anthropic can fuck you over at any time.
However, yes, Mistral is not in the business of providing you with a perfect, general purpose model. They fine tune from their base models for specific tasks.
Mistral OCR 3 isn't open weights and isn't available for download. It's only available via API, or to companies via paid consulting with Mistral.
"For organizations with stringent data privacy requirements, Mistral OCR offers a self-hosting option. This ensures that sensitive or classified information remains secure within your own infrastructure, providing compliance with regulatory and security standards. If you would like to explore self-deployment with us, please let us know."
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/ocr-3-25-12 https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3