Model reference · open weights

Audio8-ASR

Available as managed deployment Licence fee Audio Audio8 Speech→text 1 variants 2k dl/mo

Audio8-ASR is an open-weight audio or speech model from Audio8. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.

Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.

What it is

Released byAudio8
TypeAudio & music
TaskSpeech→text
Parameters (lead)324M
Runs withtransformers
Released2026-07-10
Popularity2k downloads / month
LicenceCommercial licence needed

About

What Audio8-ASR is

Audio8-ASR-0.1B is a compact autoregressive ASR model whose language-model component has only 0.1B parameters. It supports multilingual speech recognition for languages including Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese. We position it as one of the smallest usable performance ASR models in the LLM era.

This base repository provides the Hugging Face Transformers checkpoint. We also provide deployment-focused releases:

The ONNX Runtime release is designed for edge-device deployment and can run with roughly 1.1 GB peak memory footprint, depending on device, runtime configuration, and workload.

Read the full model card

The iOS release is designed for local iPhone transcription with roughly 200 MB peak runtime memory footprint, depending on device, iOS version, and workload.

Demo Video

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Evaluation Results

Evaluation suiteDataset / splitLanguageMetricScore (%)H200 RTFx
Open ASR LeaderboardAMI CleanedENWER10.99396.91
Open ASR LeaderboardEarnings22ENWER12.31654.17
Open ASR LeaderboardGigaSpeech CleanedENWER8.48641.19
Open ASR LeaderboardLibriSpeech test.cleanENWER2.70687.84
Open ASR LeaderboardLibriSpeech test.otherENWER6.59610.52
Open ASR LeaderboardSPGISpeechENWER3.73870.32
Open ASR LeaderboardVoxPopuli Cleaned AAENWER4.39686.14
Open ASR LeaderboardSeven-split mean / compositeENWER / RTFx7.03741.15
Internal canonical ASR evalWenetSpeech meetingZHCER8.842-
Internal canonical ASR evalWenetSpeech netZHCER7.976-

The Open ASR results use the seven current public splits from hf-audio/open-asr-leaderboard at dataset revision b6bdcd0beb34f8975dc659796176d88f43aff502. They were measured with the standalone Transformers package on standardized H200 Hugging Face Jobs using BF16, eager attention, greedy decoding, max_new_tokens=256, and the documented 30-second audio cap. Per-split batch sizes were 1152, 1024, 1408, 1024, 1024, 2048, and 628. Raw manifests are stored in hf://buckets/AutoArk-AI/audio8-asr-open-asr-results, and the corresponding machine-readable results are provided in .eval_results/open_asr_leaderboard.yaml.

The internal canonical WenetSpeech results come from the reproducibility-checked teacher0p6B-step3000 export with batch size 128. Its effective model tensors are byte-identical to this standalone release; the release only removes a redundant tied LM-head tensor and packages the same weights for standalone use. Chinese results are reported as character error rate. AISHELL is intentionally excluded from this table.

Model Overview

  • Task: automatic speech recognition
  • Checkpoint format: safetensors
  • Sampling rate: 16 kHz
  • Decoder: 8-layer Qwen-style causal LM
  • Audio front end: Qwen3-ASR audio encoder plus MLP adapter/projector
  • Language-model parameters: 103,502,336 (about 0.104B)
  • End-to-end unique parameters: 323,990,528 (about 0.324B)
  • Runtime: Hugging Face Transformers
  • Hotwords: optional decode-time logit boosting, no fine-tuning required

The model should be loaded with trust_remote_code=True.

Files

  • config.json, tokenizer files, processor files, and model.safetensors
  • configuration_arkasr.py, modeling_arkasr.py, processing_arkasr.py
  • qwen3_asr_audio_config.py, qwen3_asr_audio_model.py
  • hotword/: backend-agnostic hotword trie
  • examples/: Transformers inference examples

The root config.json is intentionally kept in this repository so Hugging Face can recognize the model package and count downloads through normal model-file queries.

Transformers Inference

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoProcessor

model_path = "AutoArk-AI/Audio8-ASR-0.1B"
audio_path = "path/to/audio.wav"

device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"
torch_dtype = torch.bfloat16 if device == "cuda" else torch.float32

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_path, trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_path,
    trust_remote_code=True,
    torch_dtype=torch_dtype,
    attn_implementation="eager",
).to(device)
model.eval()

conversation = [
    {
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "audio", "path": audio_path},
            {"type": "text", "text": "Please transcribe this audio."},
        ],
    }
]

batch = processor.apply_chat_template(
    conversation,
    return_tensors="pt",
    sampling_rate=16000,
    audio_padding="longest",
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    audio_max_length=30 * 16000,
    text_kwargs={"padding": "longest", "truncation": True, "max_length": 1000},
)
batch = {key: value.to(device) if hasattr(value, "to") else value for key, value in dict(batch).items()}

with torch.inference_mode():
    output_ids = model.generate(**batch, max_new_tokens=128, do_sample=False)

prompt_len = int(batch["input_ids"].shape[1])
text = processor.decode(output_ids[0, prompt_len:], skip_special_tokens=True).strip()
print(text)

Equivalent script:

python examples/transcribe.py path/to/audio.wav --model AutoArk-AI/Audio8-ASR-0.1B

For local staging before upload:

python examples/transcribe.py path/to/audio.wav --model .

Hotword Boosting

Hotwords are applied at decode time by nudging logits for tokenizer paths that match the requested words. Th

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys audio8-audio8-asr for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (audio8-audio8-asr below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -F model="audio8-audio8-asr" -F file=@audio.mp3

Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.

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