Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

My worry is that ASR will end up like OCR. If the multi modal large AI system is good enough (latency wise), the advantage of domain understanding eats the other technlogies alive.

In OCR, even when the characters are poorly scanned, the deep domain understanding these large multi modal AIs have allows it to understand what the document actually meant - this is going to be order id because in the million invoices I have seen before order id is normally below order date - etc. The same issue is going to be there in ASR also is my worry.

The problem with many STT models is that they seem to mostly be trained on perfectly-accented speech and struggle a lot with foreign accents so I’m curious to try this one as a Frenchman with a rather French English accent.

So far, the best I have found while testing models for my language learning app (Copycat Cafe) is Soniox. All others performed badly for non native accents. The worst were whisper-based models because they hallucinate when they misunderstand and tend to come up with random phrases that have nothing to do with the topic.

> Limitations

>Timestamps/Speaker diarization. The model does not feature either of these.

What a shame. Is whisperx still the best choice if you want timestamps/diarization?

Unfortunately, this model does not seem to support a custom vocabulary, word boosting or an additional prompt.

I can't say enough nice things about Cohere's services. I migrated over to their embedding model a few months ago for clip-style embeddings and it's been fantastic.

It has the most crisp, steady P50 of any external service I've used in a long time.

To clarify, this is SOTA in its size category, right? It's not better than Parakeet, for example?

Dumb question, but if this is "open source" is there source code somewhere? Or does that term mean something different in the world of models that must be trained to be useful?

Just today I shipped support for this in Whisper Memos: https://whispermemos.com/changelog/2026-04-cohere-transcribe

Accurate and fast model, very happy with it so far!

I had to set-up fireflies for our company recently. Cool tool, but I'm sending dozens of internal meetings to an american company. Our ISO inspector wouldn't be pleased to know.

This is a good option. Will check it out.

How hard could it be to train other European language(-s)?

It's great that this is Apache 2.0 licensed - several of Cohere's other models are licensed free for non-commercial use only.

Multimodels are way better

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