asr

Cohere and Cohere Labs released Cohere Transcribe Arabic, a 2B parameter automatic speech recognition model optimized for Arabic dialects and Arabic-English code-switching. The open-source model achieves a 25.9% average word error rate across major Arabic ASR benchmarks, outperforming models up to 30B parameters.

Mistral AI released Voxtral, a family of open-source speech understanding models available in 24B and 3B parameter variants under Apache 2.0 license. The models support up to 32K token context (30 minutes of audio for transcription, 40 minutes for understanding) and are priced at $0.001 per minute via API—less than half the cost of comparable proprietary systems according to Mistral.

Cohere has released Transcribe, a 2 billion parameter open-source automatic speech recognition model that the company claims tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with a 5.42% word error rate. The model supports 14 languages and is available under Apache 2.0 license, outperforming OpenAI's Whisper Large v3 and competing models on both accuracy and throughput metrics.