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Amazon Launches Alexa Plus Nationwide, Mistral AI Debuts Ultra-Fast Translation Model
Amazon rolled out its revamped, AI-powered Alexa Plus assistant nationwide in the United States on February 4, 2026, offering a new free tier for non-Prime users, according to The Verge. Simultaneously, Paris-based AI lab Mistral AI released a new family of AI models designed to facilitate seamless conversation between speakers of different languages, Wired reported.
The Alexa Plus launch makes Amazon's enhanced AI assistant available to a broader audience. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge noted that this expansion includes new tiers, providing accessibility even for those without Amazon Prime subscriptions.
Mistral AI's new speech-to-text models, Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 and Voxtral Realtime, aim to revolutionize language translation. Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 is designed for transcribing audio files in large batches, while Voxtral Realtime offers near real-time transcription within 200 milliseconds, Wired stated. Both models can translate between 13 languages. Notably, Voxtral Realtime is available under an open-source license.
According to Mistral AI, these models are small enough, at four billion parameters, to run locally on a phone or laptop. This capability marks a significant advancement in the speech-to-text field, potentially eliminating the need to send private conversations to the cloud for processing, Wired reported.
These developments arrive as consumers are seeing advancements in other tech areas, such as television display technology. Wired recently reported on RGB LED, a new kind of LED lighting system for TVs, noting that it enhances brightness and color.
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