Transcribing Audio in Vibe

Update November 2, 2026 — Le Chat is now Vibe. As of May 28, 2026, Le Chat has been rebranded as Vibe (still at chat.mistral.ai): a single agent for work and code, carrying over your conversations, settings, and subscriptions. The legacy Le Chat experience remains available in Chat mode; in Work mode, agents have become skills (invoked with @), memories have become the knowledge base, and deep research is now the Deep Research skill. The plans are now called Mistral Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise. This lesson uses the name Vibe; some menus described here may have changed names or locations.

Turning Recordings into Text

Do you have a voice recording of a meeting, lecture, podcast, or interview? Mistral Vibe can convert it into written text in seconds using Voxtral. No need to re-listen to 45 minutes of audio just to find one passage—the transcription gives you everything, black on white, making the content searchable, copyable, and actionable. This lesson covers the procedure, but more importantly, what you can do once you have the transcription, because that’s where the real productivity gain lies.

How to Transcribe an Audio File

The process is simple and identical to uploading an image:

1. Open Vibe at chat.mistral.ai
2. Upload your audio file via the attachment button (paperclip) or by drag-and-drop
3. Add your instruction: “Transcribe this audio” or a more specific request
4. Send—the transcription appears in a few seconds

Regarding formats, Vibe accepts the most common ones: MP3, the most widespread format; WAV, maximum quality but larger files; M4A, the Apple format very common on iPhones—if you record your meetings with the Voice Memos app, this is what you’ll get; open formats OGG and FLAC; and WebM, often produced by browser-based recordings. The maximum duration depends on the model, but recordings lasting several tens of minutes work without issue. For very long files, over an hour, it may be wise to split them into segments.

Beyond Simple Transcription

The strength of Voxtral in Vibe is that transcription is just a starting point. Since the same assistant handles both audio and text reasoning, you can chain transcription and analysis in a single request.

The most common case is automatic summarization: “Transcribe this audio and summarize it in 5 points.” The model transcribes first, then synthesizes the main ideas—ideal for long meetings where you only want to retain the essentials. A more operational variant is action extraction: “Transcribe this meeting recording and list the agreed-upon actions, with the owner of each action.” The model identifies commitments made, decisions taken, and responsible parties mentioned, giving you directly the follow-up list that would have taken you twenty minutes to reconstruct.

Translation works just as naturally: “Transcribe this audio in French and translate it into English” gives you both versions in a single request, since Vibe handles both transcription and translation. Finally, rephrasing comes in handy daily: “Transcribe this voice message and rewrite it more formally for an email” turns an informal voice message—thought out loud, with its hesitations—into professional written communication ready to send.

Transcription Quality

Several factors influence the quality of the result, and knowing them will save you disappointment. First, recording quality: a decent microphone and a quiet environment yield the best results—a recording made at the other end of a reverberant room will inevitably be less accurate. Next, the spoken language: the 13 supported languages, including French, English, Spanish, and German, offer excellent accuracy. Speech rate also plays a role: normal speed is handled well, but very fast speech or overlaps—two people talking at once—can reduce accuracy. As for technical vocabulary, common terms are transcribed well, but highly specialized acronyms from a specific field may require manual correction.

A word on diarization: if your recording contains multiple people, the model can identify speakers and attribute each passage to the right person. You then get a transcription structured as a dialogue—“Speaker 1: Hello, let’s start the meeting. Speaker 2: Okay, here’s the project update.” This feature is particularly valuable for meeting minutes and interviews, where knowing who said what is as important as what was said.

Everyday Use Cases

The situations where transcription comes in handy are countless. In meetings, record with your phone, upload to Vibe, and get a structured summary. For a class or conference, turn a lecture into written notes that you can review and annotate. For a podcast, transcription makes the episode searchable and accessible to people who prefer reading. A long WhatsApp voice message becomes text you can skim. And for an interview, you get an accurate transcript ready to be quoted in your articles or reports.

Best Practices

Four habits to adopt. Specify the language if the audio isn’t in French—“Transcribe this audio in English”—to avoid ambiguity. Request a format suited to your use: “Transcribe with paragraphs” for text to read, “Transcribe as a dialogue” for a conversation. Combine requests into a single instruction—“Transcribe, summarize, and list the 3 most important points”—rather than going back and forth. And always verify proper nouns: this is the weak point of any automatic transcription, and names of people, companies, or obscure places may be misspelled without any warning.

Key Takeaways

• Upload an audio file to Vibe just as you would an image
• MP3, WAV, M4A, and other formats are supported
• Transcription can be followed by a summary, translation, or action extraction
• Diarization automatically identifies different speakers
• Always verify proper nouns and technical terms in the transcription