Artificial Intelligence

NVIDIA has just released Canary-Qwen-2.5B, a groundbreaking automatic speech recognition (ASR) and language model (LLM) hybrid, which now tops the Hugging Face OpenASR leaderboard with a record-setting Word Error Rate (WER) of 5.63%. Licensed under CC-BY, this model is both commercially permissive and open-source, pushing forward enterprise-ready speech AI without usage restrictions. This release marks…

Mistral AI has released Voxtral, a family of open-weight models—Voxtral-Small-24B and Voxtral-Mini-3B—designed to handle both audio and text inputs. Built on top of Mistral’s language modeling framework, these models integrate automatic speech recognition (ASR) with natural language understanding capabilities. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Voxtral provides practical solutions for transcription, summarization, question answering, and…

Recent advances in speech enhancement (SE) have moved beyond traditional mask or signal prediction methods, turning instead to pre-trained audio models for richer, more transferable features. These models, such as WavLM, extract meaningful audio embeddings that enhance the performance of SE. Some approaches use these embeddings to predict masks or combine them with spectral data…