The original title is: "Best Open Speech Recognition (ASR) Models in 2026: WER, Languages, Latency, and License Compared"

Short summary

Open speech recognition in 2026 is no longer dominated by Whisper alone. Cohere Transcribe, IBM Granite Speech 4.1, ARK-ASR, and MOSS-Transcribe now sit within one WER point of each other on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard. This roundup compares 16 open-weight ASR models across word error rate, language coverage, streaming latency, and licensing terms.

• •16 open-weight ASR models compared on WER, language coverage, latency, and license
• •Top models are within one WER point of each other, making rank-based selection unreliable
• •Whisper's monoculture has ended with Cohere Transcribe, IBM Granite Speech 4.1, ARK-ASR, and MOSS-Transcribe as strong alternatives

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.