Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe: open ASR for 40 languages

7 hours ago (huggingface.co)

ASR = automatic speech recognition. I think this is the same as STT, speech to text?

It seems to want an NVidia GPU. I didn't look closely to find out if it can run usably without one. For me, usable might mean 10% of realtime, i.e. an overnight run on my old x86 box for 1 hour of transcription. Of course faster is always nice. YMMV.

I played around with Nemotron 3 recently. It's OK, but makes an error every few sentences, at least on the data I worked with (standard vocab). I'm sure we'll get there, but I was pleasantly surprised by how I can recognize words better than it can.

  • Agreed. I find Parakeet or Qwen ASR better.

    I’m still sad Voxtral 3 wasn’t made open source by Mistral.

From the model card, this supports near-field only speaker transcription, experimental but still something not available in any other OSS Speech LLM.

How is it for Japanese

  • testing it against parakeet right now for ASR, it's slower, heavier, and has a higher error rate. but i'm doing a pass with the embedded translation to see if that's any good, it might be worth it.

    e: also i'm testing it with a Q4 quant that might not be full accuracy

I have a few thousand audio interviews as MP3, around an hour each and with specialized vocabulary. Typically there are no more than 2 to 3 speakers. Audio quality ranges from mediocre to fair to good.

I was thinking of creating a local app that calls OpenAI’s VTT model. In my most recent evaluation, the OpenAI model was best for my use case. But is that indeed the case?