Voice AI in vogue: Nvidia releases new open transcription model

In Brief

Nvidia on Wednesday released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, a free, open-weight model that transcribes audio in up to 40 languages. It also released version 2 of Granary, its open-source speech dataset.

Nvidia boasts that Nemotron 3.5 can translate 31 languages to and from English, handle recordings up to an hour long, and tell up to eight speakers apart. It claims to beat rivals on benchmarks, including Hugging Face’s Open ASR Leaderboard.

These tools target developers building apps for business meetings and medical transcription, two of AI’s most established footholds in the workplace. Nvidia says developers can use the model, the updated Granary dataset, and tools like its NeMo Speech model to customize apps to recognize an industry’s jargon in each language. One drawback: Transcribe works with recorded audio, not live streams.

Still, the company promises Transcribe, at 30 billion parameters, can run on a single chip, from the Jetson AGX Thor robotics controller and DGX Spark chip powering new laptops, to Blackwell datacenter chips. It joins Nvidia’s open-weight voice models, including the super small yet powerful Parakeet (1.1 billion parameters).

Nvidia’s latest voice entry comes during busy period of AI voice releases: Mistral shipped Voxtral 3 earlier this month; ElevenLabs launched Realtime for instant speech in voice agents; and Salesforce released Launa-Omni, its voice model.

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