IBM announces Granite Speech updates for speech, translation and speakers

IBM announced three updates to the Granite Speech collection: the new granite-speech-5.0-2b, the revised granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc and the revised granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus. The company says the 2-billion-parameter model transcribes English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, translates those languages to and from English, and also translates from English to Italian and Mandarin. It adds language-ID prompting, biasing for lists of up to 2,000 keywords, and improved long-form translation; it is released under Apache 2.0, with support for Transformers, vLLM, llama.cpp and mlx-audio.

IBM says Turbo CTC now supports transcription in seven languages, native punctuation and capitalization, and greater resistance to reverberation, while reaching 19,870 RTFx on the Open ASR Leaderboard—about 1.6 times its launch result. The granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus received improvements to speaker attribution, timestamps, keyword biasing and long-speech performance.