Best Open Speech Recognition (ASR) Models in 2026: WER, Languages, Latency, and License Compared
Open speech recognition stopped being a Whisper monoculture a while in the final twelve months. In March 2026 Cohere released Transcribe, a 2B Apache 2.0 mannequin that took the highest of the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard at 5.42% common phrase error fee. Five weeks later IBM shipped Granite Speech 4.1 2B at 5.33%. Since…
