Meta has simply launched a brand new multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) system supporting 1,600+ languages — dwarfing OpenAI’s open supply Whisper mannequin, which helps simply 99.

Is structure additionally permits builders to increase that help to hundreds extra. Via a function known as zero-shot in-context studying, customers can present a number of paired examples of audio and textual content in a brand new language at inference time, enabling the mannequin to transcribe extra utterances in that language with none retraining.

In apply, this expands potential protection to greater than 5,400 languages — roughly each spoken language with a recognized script.

It’s a shift from static mannequin capabilities to a versatile framework that communities can adapt themselves. So whereas the 1,600 languages replicate official coaching protection, the broader determine represents Omnilingual ASR’s capability to generalize on demand, making it probably the most extensible speech recognition system launched to this point.

Better of all: it's been open sourced below a plain Apache 2.0 license — not a restrictive, quasi open-source Llama license like the corporate's prior releases, which restricted use by bigger enterprises until they paid licensing charges — that means researchers and builders are free to take and implement it instantly, without cost, with out restrictions, even in industrial and enterprise-grade tasks!

Launched on November 10 on Meta's website, Github, together with a demo space on Hugging Face and technical paper, Meta’s Omnilingual ASR suite features a household of speech recognition fashions, a 7-billion parameter multilingual audio illustration mannequin, and a large speech corpus spanning over 350 beforehand underserved languages.

All sources are freely out there below open licenses, and the fashions help speech-to-text transcription out of the field.

“By open sourcing these fashions and dataset, we purpose to interrupt down language limitations, develop digital entry, and empower communities worldwide,” Meta posted on its @AIatMeta account on X

Designed for Speech-to-Textual content Transcription

At its core, Omnilingual ASR is a speech-to-text system.

The fashions are skilled to transform spoken language into written textual content, supporting functions like voice assistants, transcription instruments, subtitles, oral archive digitization, and accessibility options for low-resource languages.

Not like earlier ASR fashions that required in depth labeled coaching information, Omnilingual ASR features a zero-shot variant.

This model can transcribe languages it has by no means seen earlier than—utilizing just some paired examples of audio and corresponding textual content.

This lowers the barrier for including new or endangered languages dramatically, eradicating the necessity for big corpora or retraining.

Mannequin Household and Technical Design

The Omnilingual ASR suite consists of a number of mannequin households skilled on greater than 4.3 million hours of audio from 1,600+ languages:

• wav2vec 2.0 fashions for self-supervised speech illustration studying (300M–7B parameters)

• CTC-based ASR fashions for environment friendly supervised transcription

• LLM-ASR fashions combining a speech encoder with a Transformer-based textual content decoder for state-of-the-art transcription

• LLM-ZeroShot ASR mannequin, enabling inference-time adaptation to unseen languages

All fashions observe an encoder–decoder design: uncooked audio is transformed right into a language-agnostic illustration, then decoded into written textual content.

Why the Scale Issues

Whereas Whisper and comparable fashions have superior ASR capabilities for world languages, they fall brief on the lengthy tail of human linguistic range. Whisper helps 99 languages. Meta’s system:

• Straight helps 1,600+ languages

• Can generalize to five,400+ languages utilizing in-context studying

• Achieves character error charges (CER) below 10% in 78% of supported languages

Amongst these supported are greater than 500 languages by no means beforehand coated by any ASR mannequin, in keeping with Meta’s analysis paper.

This enlargement opens new prospects for communities whose languages are sometimes excluded from digital instruments

Right here’s the revised and expanded background part, integrating the broader context of Meta’s 2025 AI technique, management modifications, and Llama 4’s reception, full with in-text citations and hyperlinks:

Background: Meta’s AI Overhaul and a Rebound from Llama 4

The discharge of Omnilingual ASR arrives at a pivotal second in Meta’s AI technique, following a yr marked by organizational turbulence, management modifications, and uneven product execution.

Omnilingual ASR is the primary main open-source mannequin launch because the rollout of Llama 4, Meta’s newest massive language mannequin, which debuted in April 2025 to mixed and ultimately poor reviews, with scant enterprise adoption in comparison with Chinese language open supply mannequin rivals.

The failure led Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to nominate Alexandr Wang, co-founder and prior CEO of AI information provider Scale AI, as Chief AI Officer, and embark on an extensive and costly hiring spree that shocked the AI and enterprise communities with eye-watering pay packages for top AI researchers.

In distinction, Omnilingual ASR represents a strategic and reputational reset. It returns Meta to a website the place the corporate has traditionally led — multilingual AI — and presents a really extensible, community-oriented stack with minimal limitations to entry.

The system’s help for 1,600+ languages and its extensibility to over 5,000 extra through zero-shot in-context studying reassert Meta’s engineering credibility in language know-how.

Importantly, it does so via a free and permissively licensed launch, below Apache 2.0, with clear dataset sourcing and reproducible coaching protocols.

This shift aligns with broader themes in Meta’s 2025 technique. The corporate has refocused its narrative round a “private superintelligence” imaginative and prescient, investing closely in infrastructure (together with a September launch of customized AI accelerators and Arm-based inference stacks) source whereas downplaying the metaverse in favor of foundational AI capabilities. The return to public coaching information in Europe after a regulatory pause additionally underscores its intention to compete globally, regardless of privateness scrutiny source.

Omnilingual ASR, then, is greater than a mannequin launch — it’s a calculated transfer to reassert management of the narrative: from the fragmented rollout of Llama 4 to a high-utility, research-grounded contribution that aligns with Meta’s long-term AI platform technique.

Group-Centered Dataset Assortment

To attain this scale, Meta partnered with researchers and neighborhood organizations in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere to create the Omnilingual ASR Corpus, a 3,350-hour dataset throughout 348 low-resource languages. Contributors had been compensated native audio system, and recordings had been gathered in collaboration with teams like:

• African Subsequent Voices: A Gates Basis–supported consortium together with Maseno College (Kenya), College of Pretoria, and Information Science Nigeria

• Mozilla Basis’s Widespread Voice, supported via the Open Multilingual Speech Fund

• Lanfrica / NaijaVoices, which created information for 11 African languages together with Igala, Serer, and Urhobo

The information assortment targeted on pure, unscripted speech. Prompts had been designed to be culturally related and open-ended, akin to “Is it higher to have a number of shut buddies or many informal acquaintances? Why?” Transcriptions used established writing programs, with high quality assurance constructed into each step.

Efficiency and {Hardware} Concerns

The most important mannequin within the suite, the omniASR_LLM_7B, requires ~17GB of GPU reminiscence for inference, making it appropriate for deployment on high-end {hardware}. Smaller fashions (300M–1B) can run on lower-power units and ship real-time transcription speeds.

Efficiency benchmarks present sturdy outcomes even in low-resource eventualities:

• CER <10% in 95% of high-resource and mid-resource languages

• CER <10% in 36% of low-resource languages

• Robustness in noisy circumstances and unseen domains, particularly with fine-tuning

The zero-shot system, omniASR_LLM_7B_ZS, can transcribe new languages with minimal setup. Customers present a number of pattern audio–textual content pairs, and the mannequin generates transcriptions for brand spanking new utterances in the identical language.

Open Entry and Developer Tooling

All fashions and the dataset are licensed below permissive phrases:

• Apache 2.0 for fashions and code

• CC-BY 4.0 for the Omnilingual ASR Corpus on HuggingFace

Set up is supported through PyPI and uv:

pip set up omnilingual-asr

Meta additionally gives:

• A HuggingFace dataset integration

• Pre-built inference pipelines

• Language-code conditioning for improved accuracy

Builders can view the complete listing of supported languages utilizing the API:

from omnilingual_asr.fashions.wav2vec2_llama.lang_ids import supported_langs

print(len(supported_langs))
print(supported_langs)

Broader Implications

Omnilingual ASR reframes language protection in ASR from a hard and fast listing to an extensible framework. It permits:

• Group-driven inclusion of underrepresented languages

• Digital entry for oral and endangered languages

• Analysis on speech tech in linguistically numerous contexts

Crucially, Meta emphasizes moral concerns all through—advocating for open-source participation and collaboration with native-speaking communities.

“No mannequin can ever anticipate and embody the entire world’s languages prematurely,” the Omnilingual ASR paper states, “however Omnilingual ASR makes it doable for communities to increase recognition with their very own information.”

Entry the Instruments

All sources at the moment are out there at:

• Code + Fashions: github.com/facebookresearch/omnilingual-asr

• Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/facebook/omnilingual-asr-corpus

• Blogpost: ai.meta.com/blog/omnilingual-asr

What This Means for Enterprises

For enterprise builders, particularly these working in multilingual or worldwide markets, Omnilingual ASR considerably lowers the barrier to deploying speech-to-text programs throughout a broader vary of consumers and geographies.

As an alternative of counting on industrial ASR APIs that help solely a slim set of high-resource languages, groups can now combine an open-source pipeline that covers over 1,600 languages out of the field—with the choice to increase it to hundreds extra through zero-shot studying.

This flexibility is very useful for enterprises working in sectors like voice-based buyer help, transcription providers, accessibility, training, or civic know-how, the place native language protection is usually a aggressive or regulatory necessity. As a result of the fashions are launched below the permissive Apache 2.0 license, companies can fine-tune, deploy, or combine them into proprietary programs with out restrictive phrases.

It additionally represents a shift within the ASR panorama—from centralized, cloud-gated choices to community-extendable infrastructure. By making multilingual speech recognition extra accessible, customizable, and cost-effective, Omnilingual ASR opens the door to a brand new era of enterprise speech functions constructed round linguistic inclusion moderately than linguistic limitation.

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