Granite 4.0 1B Speech: Compact, Multilingual, and Built for the Edge

Granite 4.0 1B Speech is the latest addition to IBM's Granite Speech collection, designed for enterprise applications on resource-constrained devices, offering compact multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and bidirectional speech translation (AST). This model, with half the parameters of its predecessor, excels in English transcription accuracy, faster inference, and expanded language support, including English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, with new features such as Japanese ASR support and keyword list biasing for better recognition of names and acronyms. Despite its small size, Granite 4.0 1B Speech ranks #1 on the OpenASR leaderboard, demonstrating strong ASR performance with low Word Error Rates across multiple datasets compared to larger models. Released under an Apache 2.0 license, it supports various benchmarks and is recommended for use with Granite Guardian in production for additional risk detection.