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Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

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Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#51

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 h…

For quite a long time there will be a greater advantage to local processing for STT than for TTT chat, or even OCR. Being able to do STT on the device that owns the microphone means that the bandwidth off that device can be dramatically reduced, if it's even necessary for the task at hand.

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#52
It's probably another ASR model that focuses on benchmarks and simple uses instead of more challenging real use cases.

I upload edited gameplay vods of twitch streams on youtube, and use whisper-large-v3 to provide subtitles for accessibility reasons (youtube's own auto-subtitles suck, tho they've been getting better).

My checklist for a good ASR model for my use case is:

1. Have timestamp support.

2. Support overlapping speakers.

3. Accurate transcripts that don't coalesce half words/interrupted sentences.

4. Support non verbal stuff like [coughs], [groans], [laughs], [sighs], etc.

5. Allow context injection of non-trivial sizes (10k+ words)

1 is obvious because without it we can't have subtitles. Force alignment fails too often.

2 is crucial for real world scenarios because in the real world people talk over each other all the time, in my case it's a streamer talking over gameplay audio, or when the streamer has guests over. When 2 people speak the transcript either ignores one of them, or in the worst case, both of them.

3 and 4 are an accessibility thing, if you're deaf or hard of hearing having a more literal transcript of what's being said conveys better how the speaker is speaking. If all subtitles are properly "spell-checked" then it's clear your model is overfit to the benchmarks.

5 Is not a requirement per se, but more of a nice to have. In my use cause the streamer is often reading stream chat so feeding the model the list of users that recently talked, recent chat messages, text on screen, etc. Would make for more accurate transcripts.

I've tried many models, and the closest that fulfill my needs are LLM style models on top of forced alignment. It's too slow, so I've been sticky with whisper because with whisperx I can get a transcript in 5 minutes with just a single command.

One thing all these models do (including whisper) is just omit full sentences, it's the worst thing a model can do.

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#54
post #24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the commercial space, there’s a lack of production grade ASR APIs that support diarization and word level timestamps. My experiences with Google’s Chirp have been horrendous, with it sometimes skipping sections of speech entirely, hallucinating speech where the audio contains noise, and unreliable word level timestamps. And this all is even with using their new audio prefiltering feature. AWS works slightly b…

Isn't Elevenlabs the best in this?

They can have issues with the timestamps: https://github.com/elevenlabs/elevenlabs-python/issues/707

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#55
post #10

> 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?

Diarization is done separately to ASR anyway (it's usually a separate run, after the ASR).

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#57

Ran it over our internal dataset of ~250 recordings of people saying british postcodes (all kinds of accents, etc) - it's competitive for sure! Soniox (stt-async-v4): 176/248 (71.0%) ElevenLabs (scribe_v2): 170/248 (68.5%) AssemblyAI (universal-3-pro): 166/248 (66.9%) Deepgram (nova-3): 158/248 (63.7%) AssemblyAI (universal-2): 148/248 (59.7%) Cohere (transcribe-03-2026): 148/248 (59.7%) Speechmatics (enhanced): 134/…

did you try gladia: ranking #1 on STT blind test https://compare-stt.com/

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#58
post #52

It's probably another ASR model that focuses on benchmarks and simple uses instead of more challenging real use cases. I upload edited gameplay vods of twitch streams on youtube, and use whisper-large-v3 to provide subtitles for accessibility reasons (youtube's own auto-subtitles suck, tho they've been getting better). My checklist for a good ASR model for my use case is: 1. Have timestamp support. 2. Support overlap…

[dead]

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#59
post #52

It's probably another ASR model that focuses on benchmarks and simple uses instead of more challenging real use cases. I upload edited gameplay vods of twitch streams on youtube, and use whisper-large-v3 to provide subtitles for accessibility reasons (youtube's own auto-subtitles suck, tho they've been getting better). My checklist for a good ASR model for my use case is: 1. Have timestamp support. 2. Support overlap…

3/4 are actually negative value for most customers

Re: Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition

#60

Ran it over our internal dataset of ~250 recordings of people saying british postcodes (all kinds of accents, etc) - it's competitive for sure! Soniox (stt-async-v4): 176/248 (71.0%) ElevenLabs (scribe_v2): 170/248 (68.5%) AssemblyAI (universal-3-pro): 166/248 (66.9%) Deepgram (nova-3): 158/248 (63.7%) AssemblyAI (universal-2): 148/248 (59.7%) Cohere (transcribe-03-2026): 148/248 (59.7%) Speechmatics (enhanced): 134/…

Is the human baseline 248/248?
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