Header image with a collage of on-the-ground photos from the transcription gathering efforts in Pakistan and Liberia.
Photographs captured during corpus creation efforts in Pakistan and Liberia.
Omnilingual ASR: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages
Omnilingual ASR is an open-source speech recognition system supporting over 1,600 languages — including hundreds never previously covered by any ASR technology. Designed for broad accessibility, it enables new languages to be added with just a few paired examples without requiring specialized expertise or large datasets. By combining scalable zero-shot learning with a flexible model family, Omnilingual ASR aims to make speech technology more inclusive and adaptable for communities and researchers worldwide.
Our 7B-LLM-ASR system achieves state-of-the-art performance across 1,600+ languages, with character error rates (CER) below 10 for 78% of those languages.
Asset Management - Configuration system for models, tokenizers, and datasets
Training & Data Pipeline
Data Preparation - End-to-end guide for multilingual dataset preparation, HuggingFace integration, and parquet processing
Training Recipes - Pre-configured workflows for CTC and LLM model training
Installation
The models were developed using fairseq2, a research-focused sequence modeling toolkit. While we provide a reference inference pipeline that works across platforms, audio support requires libsndfile (Mac: brew install libsndfile; Windows may need an additional setup).
bash
1# using pip2pip install omnilingual-asr
34# using uv5uv add omnilingual-asr
⚠️ Important: Currently only audio files shorter than 40 seconds are accepted for inference. We plan to add support for transcribing unlimited-length audio files shortly.
Supported Languages
To view the full list of 1600+ supported languages, you can access the language list programmatically:
python
1from omnilingual_asr.models.wav2vec2_llama.lang_ids import supported_langs
23# Print all supported languages4print(f"Total supported languages: {len(supported_langs)}")5print(supported_langs)67# Check if a specific language is supported8if"eng_Latn"in supported_langs:9print("English (Latin script) is supported!")
Languages follow the format {language_code}_{script}, for example eng_Latn - English (Latin script), cmn_Hans - Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), ...
Using the HuggingFace Dataset 🤗
We provide a large-scale multilingual speech dataset on HuggingFace under CC-BY-4.0 License: facebook/omnilingual-asr-corpus.
This dataset can be directly used with our inference pipeline for evaluation or testing:
pip install "omnilingual-asr[data]"
python
1from datasets import load_dataset
2from omnilingual_asr.models.inference.pipeline import ASRInferencePipeline
34# Load dataset for a specific language (e.g., Ligurian)5omni_dataset = load_dataset("facebook/omnilingual-asr-corpus","lij_Latn", split="train", streaming=True)6batch =next(omni_dataset.iter(5))78# Convert to pipeline input format9audio_data =[{"waveform": x["array"],"sample_rate": x["sampling_rate"]}10for x in batch["audio"]]1112# Run inference13pipeline = ASRInferencePipeline(model_card="omniASR_LLM_7B")14transcriptions = pipeline.transcribe(audio_data, batch_size=2)1516# Display results17for i,(transcription, original_text)inenumerate(zip(transcriptions, batch["raw_text"]),1):18print(f"\n Sample {i}:")19print(f" Ground Truth: {original_text}")20print(f" Predicted: {transcription}")
We provide a high-level model architecture overview in the model directory (src/omnilingual_asr/models), with individual configurations for each model family in the respective directories:
Omnilingual ASR code and models are released under the Apache 2.0.
Citation
If you use the omnilingual ASR model suite in your research and wish to cite us, please use the following BibTeX entry (arxiv version will be added soon)!
bibtex
1@misc{omnilingualasr2025,
2 title={{Omnilingual ASR}: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages},
3 author={{Omnilingual ASR Team} and Keren, Gil and Kozhevnikov, Artyom and Meng, Yen and Ropers, Christophe and Setzler, Matthew and Wang, Skyler and Adebara, Ife and Auli, Michael and Balioglu, Can and Chan, Kevin and Cheng, Chierh and Chuang, Joe and Droof, Caley and Duppenthaler, Mark and Duquenne, Paul-Ambroise and Erben, Alexander and Gao, Cynthia and Mejia Gonzalez, Gabriel and Lyu, Kehan and Miglani, Sagar and Pratap, Vineel and Sadagopan, Kaushik Ram and Saleem, Safiyyah and Turkatenko, Arina and Ventayol-Boada, Albert and Yong, Zheng-Xin and Chung, Yu-An and Maillard, Jean and Moritz, Rashel and Mourachko, Alexandre and Williamson, Mary and Yates, Shireen},
4 year={2025},
5 url={https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/omnilingual-asr-open-source-multilingual-speech-recognition-for-1600-languages/},
6}