Granite 4.0 1B Speech: Compact, Multilingual, and Built for the Edge

IBM has released Granite 4.0 1B Speech, a compact multilingual model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and translation (AST). Designed for enterprise applications on resource-constrained devices, it has only half the parameters of its predecessor but delivers higher English transcription accuracy and faster inference. The model introduces support for Japanese ASR and keyword biasing, and now covers six languages in total. It achieves highly competitive results on standard benchmarks, ranking #1 on the OpenASR leaderboard, and is available under an Apache 2.0 license.