IBM updates its open Granite Speech models for calls, meetings and fast transcripts

IBM has released three open speech models under Apache 2.0. The new granite-speech-5.0-2b transcribes English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, translates to and from English in those languages, and accepts keyword lists of up to 2,000 terms for product names, people and acronyms. IBM says it ranks second among open-weight models on the Open ASR Leaderboard for English word error rate (5.06%). The updated granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc is built for speed and on-device use, and now covers seven languages with punctuation built in. The updated granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus is a drop-in replacement for meetings and calls; by IBM's own figures it labels speakers more accurately and cuts word errors on long recordings by 24%.