Model reference · open weights
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 by | Audio8 |
|---|---|
| Type | Audio & music |
| Task | Speech→text |
| Parameters (lead) | 324M |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2026-07-10 |
| Popularity | 2k downloads / month |
| Licence | Commercial licence needed |
About
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.
The iOS release is designed for local iPhone transcription with roughly 200 MB peak runtime memory footprint, depending on device, iOS version, and workload.
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| Evaluation suite | Dataset / split | Language | Metric | Score (%) | H200 RTFx |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open ASR Leaderboard | AMI Cleaned | EN | WER | 10.99 | 396.91 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | Earnings22 | EN | WER | 12.31 | 654.17 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | GigaSpeech Cleaned | EN | WER | 8.48 | 641.19 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | LibriSpeech test.clean | EN | WER | 2.70 | 687.84 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | LibriSpeech test.other | EN | WER | 6.59 | 610.52 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | SPGISpeech | EN | WER | 3.73 | 870.32 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | VoxPopuli Cleaned AA | EN | WER | 4.39 | 686.14 |
| Open ASR Leaderboard | Seven-split mean / composite | EN | WER / RTFx | 7.03 | 741.15 |
| Internal canonical ASR eval | WenetSpeech meeting | ZH | CER | 8.842 | - |
| Internal canonical ASR eval | WenetSpeech net | ZH | CER | 7.976 | - |
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.
safetensorsThe model should be loaded with trust_remote_code=True.
config.json, tokenizer files, processor files, and model.safetensorsconfiguration_arkasr.py, modeling_arkasr.py, processing_arkasr.pyqwen3_asr_audio_config.py, qwen3_asr_audio_model.pyhotword/: backend-agnostic hotword trieexamples/: Transformers inference examplesThe 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.
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 .
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
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.