Granite Speech 5.0: Transcribe, Translate, and Attribute more Accurately and Faster

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.

Model	Status	What's new	Best for
granite-speech-5.0-2b	New	More accurate, noise- and reverb-robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), language-ID prompting, 2,000-term keyword biasing, better long-form translation	High-accuracy multilingual transcription and translation
granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc	Updated	Multilingual, native punctuation and capitalization, and more robust to noise and reverb	High-throughput and on-device transcription
granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus	Updated	Improved speaker attribution, timestamps, keyword biasing, and long-speech performance	Meetings, calls, and other multi-speaker recordings

Granite Speech 5.0 2B: more accurate, more robust, more control

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.

What's new compared with 4.1 2B Speech:

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.