IBM

Top Open ASR Models of 2026: WER, Languages, Latency, and License Comparison

The open speech recognition landscape has diversified beyond Whisper, with multiple models achieving sub-6% WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard. Key developments include Cohere Transcribe, IBM Granite Speech 4.1, and various models for throughput, streaming, and language coverage. The report emphasizes that license, language support, throughput, and streaming capability are now more critical than raw leaderboard rank.

Cohere IBM NVIDIA Alibaba/Qwen Mistral Kyutai Meta OpenAI