6 ms·
Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition
- geooff_ 7mo agoI can't say enough nice things about Cohere's services. I migrated over to their embedding model a few months ago for clip-style embeddings and it's been fantastic. It has the most crisp, steady P50 of any external service I've used in a long time.
- bluegatty 7mo agocan u comment on overall quality? their models tend to be a bit smaller and less performant overall.
- geooff_ 7mo agoMy baseline was Jina, A Chinese model provider. I had major issues with their reliability. I have no comparison to provide in terms of offline metrics as I had to do an emergency migration because their inference service has extended downtimes. My experience with Cohere and interacting with their sales engineers has been boring, I say that is the most flattering way possible. Embeddings are a core service at this point like VMs and DBs. They just need to work and work well and thats what they're selling.
- roflcopter69 7mo ago[dead]
- simonw 7mo agoIt's great that this is Apache 2.0 licensed - several of Cohere's other models are licensed free for non-commercial use only.
- dinakernel 7mo agoMy worry is that ASR will end up like OCR. If the multi modal large AI system is good enough (latency wise), the advantage of domain understanding eats the other technlogies alive. In OCR, even when the characters are poorly scanned, the deep domain understanding these large multi modal AIs have allows it to understand what the document actually meant - this is going to be order id because in the million invoices I have seen before order id is normally below order date - etc. The same issue is going to be there in ASR also is my worry.
- progbits 7mo agoThis is both good and bad. Good ASR can often understand low quality / garbled speech that I could not figure out, but it also "over corrects" sometimes and replaces correct but low prior words with incorrect but much more common ones. With OCR the risk is you get another xerox[1] incident where all your data looks plausible but is incorrect. Hope you kept the originals! (This is why for my personal doc scans, I use OCR only for full text search, but retain the original raw scans forever) [1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
- nkzd 7mo agoWhy are you 'worried' about it? Shouldn't we strive for better technology even if it means some will 'lose'?
- yorwba 7mo ago"Better" isn't just about increasing benchmark numbers. Often, it's more important that a system fails safely than how often it fails. Automatic speech recognition that guesses when the input is unclear will occasionally be right and therefore have a lower word error rate, but if it's important that the output be correct, it might be better to insert "[unintelligible]" and have a human double-check.
- IshKebab 7mo agoIt's better in terms of WER. It's not better in terms of not making shit up that sounds plausible. Probably the answer is simply to tweak the metric so it's a bit more smart than WER - allow "unclear" output which is penalised less than actually incorrect answers. I'd be surprised if nobody has done that.
- ks2048 7mo agoIdeally, you'd be able to specify exactly what you want - do you want to write-out filled pauses ("aaah", "umm")? Do you want to get a transcription of the the disfluencies - re-starts, etc. or just get out a cleaned up version?
- topazas 7mo agoHow hard could it be to train other European language(-s)?
- gunalx 7mo agoIf you have to ask you dont really need the answer. Seems to not be to difficult in finding or creating training code. So a pretty decent amount of high quality training data should be many hours. And a few hours in high end data enter GPU compute, and many iterations to get it right.
- harvey9 7mo agoIt includes several European languages.
- stronglikedan 7mo agohence "other" lol
- teach 7mo agoDumb question, but if this is "open source" is there source code somewhere? Or does that term mean something different in the world of models that must be trained to be useful?
- stronglikedan 7mo agoI presume it means the model itself.
- Doman 7mo agoFiles can be downloaded here: https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026/tree/main https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026/... And someone has already converted it to onnx format: https://huggingface.co/eschmidbauer/cohere-transcribe-03-2026-onnx https://huggingface.co/eschmidbauer/cohere-transcribe-03-202... - so it can be run on CPU instead of GPU.
- gunalx 7mo agoMost use definition is just awailable weigths. This kids make sense because "compiling" (training) the model cost inhibitly much, and we can still benefit from the artifacts.
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- gruez 7mo ago> Limitations >Timestamps/Speaker diarization. The model does not feature either of these. What a shame. Is whisperx still the best choice if you want timestamps/diarization?
- akreal 7mo agoWhisperX is not a model but a software package built around Whisper and some other models, including diarization and alignment ones. Something similar will be built around the Cohere Transcribe model, maybe even just an integration to WhisperX itself.
- GaggiX 7mo agoThere is also: https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped It doesn't use an extra model (so it supports every language that works with Whisper out of the box and use less memory), it works by applying Dynamic Time Warping to cross-attention weights.
- oezi 7mo agoJust a warning that plain WhisperX is more accurate and Whisper-timestamped has many weird quirks.
- bartman 7mo agoEven in the commercial space, there’s a lack of production grade ASR APIs that support diarization and word level timestamps. My experiences with Google’s Chirp have been horrendous, with it sometimes skipping sections of speech entirely, hallucinating speech where the audio contains noise, and unreliable word level timestamps. And this all is even with using their new audio prefiltering feature. AWS works slightly better, but also has trouble with keeping word level timestamps in sync. Whisper is nice but hallucinates regularly. OpenAI’s new transcription models are delivering accurate output but do not support word level timestamps… A lot of this could be worked around by sending the resulting transcripts through a few layers of post processing, but… I just want to pay for an API that is reliable and saves me from doing all that work.
- Void_ 7mo agoJust today I shipped support for this in Whisper Memos: https://whispermemos.com/changelog/2026-04-cohere-transcribe https://whispermemos.com/changelog/2026-04-cohere-transcribe Accurate and fast model, very happy with it so far!
- ramon156 7mo agoI had to set-up fireflies for our company recently. Cool tool, but I'm sending dozens of internal meetings to an american company. Our ISO inspector wouldn't be pleased to know. This is a good option. Will check it out.
- Oras 7mo agoThere are many open source STT models that can run locally on Mac with good performance, such as whisper and Parakeet
- stavros 7mo agoTo clarify, this is SOTA in its size category, right? It's not better than Parakeet, for example?
- caminanteblanco 7mo agoWell, to clarify, it is both larger than parakeet in parameter count (parakeet is available in 0.6B and 1.1B), since it's 2B params, and also performs better than it on the benchmarks that hugging face publishes on the openASR leaderboard
- stavros 7mo agoAhh thanks, I confused my parameter count, thanks. I guess Parakeet is 0.6B, I was somehow thinking 6B.
- jwineinger 7mo agoLooking at the ASR leaderboard (https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard), Parakeet (.6B) is still near the top on speed, but about 10th on WER.
- stavros 7mo agoThanks, I don't know how much to trust benchmarks so I figured I'd ask.
- kalmuraee 7mo agoMultimodels are way better
- Fidelix 7mo agoCan you clarify? I tested a few and they are rubbish and don't have the same features.
- _medihack_ 7mo agoUnfortunately, this model does not seem to support a custom vocabulary, word boosting or an additional prompt.
- kieloo 7mo agoThe problem with many STT models is that they seem to mostly be trained on perfectly-accented speech and struggle a lot with foreign accents so I’m curious to try this one as a Frenchman with a rather French English accent. So far, the best I have found while testing models for my language learning app (Copycat Cafe) is Soniox. All others performed badly for non native accents. The worst were whisper-based models because they hallucinate when they misunderstand and tend to come up with random phrases that have nothing to do with the topic.
- theaicloser 7mo ago[flagged]
- BreezyBadger 7mo agoAwesome. Going to see if I can port https://scrivvy.ai https://scrivvy.ai to this. based in Canada
- neom 7mo agoI knew that name looked familiar. Hello from a fellow Canuck who you follow on twitter. :D
- BreezyBadger 7mo agohey! wave
- bkitano19 7mo agonotable omission of deepgram models in comparisons?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jilijeanlouis 7mo agosame for gladia it's ranked top 1 in the STT blind tests: https://compare-stt.com/ https://compare-stt.com/
- scotty79 7mo agodeepgram seems really good (esp Enhanced and Nova 3 models).
- mnbbrown 7mo agoRan it over our internal dataset of ~250 recordings of people saying british postcodes (all kinds of accents, etc) - it's competitive for sure! Soniox (stt-async-v4): 176/248 (71.0%) ElevenLabs (scribe_v2): 170/248 (68.5%) AssemblyAI (universal-3-pro): 166/248 (66.9%) Deepgram (nova-3): 158/248 (63.7%) AssemblyAI (universal-2): 148/248 (59.7%) Cohere (transcribe-03-2026): 148/248 (59.7%) Speechmatics (enhanced): 134/248 (54.0%) P.s. how do I get this to render correctly on here?
- Bolwin 7mo agoTry two newlines between each one
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoThat, or add 4 spaces before each line (renders as a <pre>).
- mkl 7mo agoTwo spaces: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc It's for code though, not lists or bullet points.
- jilijeanlouis 7mo agodid you try gladia: ranking #1 on STT blind test https://compare-stt.com/ https://compare-stt.com/
- scotty79 7mo agoThis benchmark should have Whisper large-v3 as one of the models.
- mnbbrown 7mo agoAdded gladia.. - 1. Soniox (stt-async-v4): +176 new cases, running total 176/248 (71.0%) - 2. ElevenLabs (scribe_v2): +26 new cases, running total 202/248 (81.5%) - 3. Speechmatics (enhanced): +12 new cases, running total 214/248 (86.3%) - 4. NVIDIA Parakeet (TDT 0.6B v2): +6 new cases, running total 220/248 (88.7%) - 5. Mistral (voxtral-mini): +3 new cases, running total 223/248 (89.9%) - 6. Gladia: +2 new cases, running total 225/248 (90.7%) - 7. AssemblyAI (universal-2): +1 new cases, running total 226/248 (91.1%) - 8. Deepgram (nova-3): +1 new cases, running total 227/248 (91.5%) - 9. Cohere (transcribe-03-2026): +0 new cases, running total 227/248 (91.5%) - 10. AssemblyAI (universal-3-pro): +0 new cases, running total 227/248 (91.5%)
- nodja 7mo agoIt's probably another ASR model that focuses on benchmarks and simple uses instead of more challenging real use cases. I upload edited gameplay vods of twitch streams on youtube, and use whisper-large-v3 to provide subtitles for accessibility reasons (youtube's own auto-subtitles suck, tho they've been getting better). My checklist for a good ASR model for my use case is: 1. Have timestamp support. 2. Support overlapping speakers. 3. Accurate transcripts that don't coalesce half words/interrupted sentences. 4. Support non verbal stuff like [coughs], [groans], [laughs], [sighs], etc. 5. Allow context injection of non-trivial sizes (10k+ words) 1 is obvious because without it we can't have subtitles. Force alignment fails too often. 2 is crucial for real world scenarios because in the real world people talk over each other all the time, in my case it's a streamer talking over gameplay audio, or when the streamer has guests over. When 2 people speak the transcript either ignores one of them, or in the worst case, both of them. 3 and 4 are an accessibility thing, if you're deaf or hard of hearing having a more literal transcript of what's being said conveys better how the speaker is speaking. If all subtitles are properly "spell-checked" then it's clear your model is overfit to the benchmarks. 5 Is not a requirement per se, but more of a nice to have. In my use cause the streamer is often reading stream chat so feeding the model the list of users that recently talked, recent chat messages, text on screen, etc. Would make for more accurate transcripts. I've tried many models, and the closest that fulfill my needs are LLM style models on top of forced alignment. It's too slow, so I've been sticky with whisper because with whisperx I can get a transcript in 5 minutes with just a single command. One thing all these models do (including whisper) is just omit full sentences, it's the worst thing a model can do.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoI remember Dragon Dictate. You had to spend ages, training it, and it still did a suckass job. I recently was interviewed for a podcast, and she published it on Apple Podcasts. Apple does a transcript of the podcast. I assume it’s some kind of AI (not sure if it’s the same engine as Siri -which I’m not too thrilled with). It made quite a few errors (not too bad -but errors, nonetheless), but the thing that annoyed me the most, is that it didn’t differentiate between speakers.
- aitchnyu 7mo agoYou mean the ones designed to work on 64MB of RAM and CPU? I downloaded too many speech recognition and TTS shareware as a kid.