Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe: open ASR for 40 languages

ASR = automatic speech recognition. I think this is the same as STT, speech to text?

It seems to want an NVidia GPU. I didn't look closely to find out if it can run usably without one. For me, usable might mean 10% of realtime, i.e. an overnight run on my old x86 box for 1 hour of transcription. Of course faster is always nice. YMMV.

> Transcribe is built for recorded audio, not live streaming.

Bit unfortunate! Nemotron Streaming in Handy has basically solved dictation for me. It recognizes German mixed with English terms and brand names really well.

I played around with Nemotron 3 recently. It's OK, but makes an error every few sentences, at least on the data I worked with (standard vocab). I'm sure we'll get there, but I was pleasantly surprised by how I can recognize words better than it can.

From the model card, this supports near-field only speaker transcription, experimental but still something not available in any other OSS Speech LLM.

How is it for Japanese

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You can use fast transcription on CPU these days, for free and with diarization. Check yapsnap https://github.com/kouhxp/yapsnap

I have a few thousand audio interviews as MP3, around an hour each and with specialized vocabulary. Typically there are no more than 2 to 3 speakers. Audio quality ranges from mediocre to fair to good.

I was thinking of creating a local app that calls OpenAI’s VTT model. In my most recent evaluation, the OpenAI model was best for my use case. But is that indeed the case?