We're excited to share three updates to IBM's Granite Speech collection: a new speech-language model, granite-speech-5.0-2b, and revised versions of two models the community already uses, granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc and granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus. Together they cover the full range of enterprise speech work: transcription and translation with high accuracy, extremely fast transcription at the edge, and recordings where who spoke, and when, matter as much as what was said.
granite-speech-5.0-2b is the successor to granite-speech-4.1-2b at the same parameter count. It transcribes English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, and translates to and from English in those languages, plus English to Italian and Mandarin. It was trained on 390,000 hours of public audio, plus synthetic data built for Japanese ASR, keyword biasing, and translation.
The model ships under Apache 2.0 with support in Transformers, vLLM, llama.cpp, and mlx-audio for Apple Silicon.
Chart 1: granite-speech-5.0-2b ranks #2 among top open-weight ASR models on average English WER (5.06%). Lower is better. Results are unofficial, as of 15 October 2026, and averaged over the Open ASR Leaderboard’s public English short-form test sets.
When we introduced Turbo CTC in August, it was an English-only, 470M-parameter encoder built for speed. This revision keeps that footprint and adds the three things users asked for most:
It's also faster. 6x faster, at the same accuracy level.
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