Open speech recognition stopped being a Whisper monoculture in 2026. Cohere Transcribe, IBM Granite Speech 4.1, ARK-ASR and MOSS-Transcribe are now separated by less than one WER point on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard — which means rank no longer decides anything. This roundup compares 16 open-weight models on word error rate, language coverage, streaming latency and license, and shows why the published averages cannot be subtracted from one another.
The post Best Open Speech Recognition (ASR) Models in 2026: WER, Languages, Latency, and License Compared appeared first on MarkTechPost.