🏆 Best open-source speech recognition model for the Kazakh language.
Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo is a Whisper-based speech-to-text model fine-tuned specifically for Kazakh using a large-scale mixture of public speech datasets.
The model is built on OpenAI's Whisper Large-v3 Turbo architecture and trained on over 841,000 speech-transcript pairs representing approximately 1,500+ hours of Kazakh speech collected from multiple public sources.
The resulting checkpoint is a merged full Transformers model that can be used directly without LoRA adapters or custom loading code.
Key Features
Optimized specifically for Kazakh ASR
Trained on 841k+ speech-transcript pairs
1,500+ hours of speech
Based on Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
Ready-to-use Transformers checkpoint
Evaluated on external and internal benchmarks
Compatible with Hugging Face pipelines
Suitable for production and research use
Benchmark Summary
FLEURS Kazakh Test
Model
WER ↓
CER ↓
Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
11.80%
4.98%
Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
19.75%
5.05%
Wav2Vec2 XLSR Kazakh
21.75%
6.24%
Whisper Large-v3
31.10%
6.57%
Whisper Medium
48.69%
10.92%
Whisper Small
70.45%
21.23%
The model achieves the strongest performance among the evaluated open-source Kazakh ASR systems in this benchmark suite.
Internal Kazakh ASR Test Set
This benchmark uses a fixed 5,000-example held-out test subset from the cleaned Kazakh ASR mixture.
This evaluation is an internal benchmark and should be interpreted as a secondary result. The FLEURS Kazakh test is used as the main external benchmark.
Model
Examples
WER ↓
CER ↓
Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
5,000
8.73%
2.10%
Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
5,000
17.37%
3.73%
Wav2Vec2 XLSR Kazakh
5,000
21.07%
4.22%
Whisper Large-v3
5,000
40.80%
9.09%
Whisper Medium
5,000
59.05%
14.58%
Whisper Small
5,000
77.48%
23.52%
Inference Speed Benchmark
Inference speed was measured on 106 audio files (30.27 minutes total audio) using a Kaggle NVIDIA T4 GPU.
This benchmark is intended to provide a practical comparison of recognition speed across commonly used open-source ASR models.
Model
WER ↓
CER ↓
Inference Time ↓
RTF ↓
Speed ↑
Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
11.80%
4.98%
117.28 sec
0.0646
15.48×
Whisper Large-v3 Turbo
19.75%
5.05%
125.37 sec
0.0690
14.48×
Wav2Vec2 XLSR Kazakh
21.75%
6.24%
11.56 sec
0.0064
157.08×
Whisper Large-v3
31.10%
6.57%
572.48 sec
0.3153
3.17×
Whisper Medium
48.69%
10.92%
394.08 sec
0.2170
4.61×
Whisper Small
70.45%
21.23%
225.84 sec
0.1244
8.04×
Notes
WER (Word Error Rate): lower is better.
CER (Character Error Rate): lower is better.
RTF (Real-Time Factor): lower is faster.
Speed: audio duration divided by inference time. Higher is faster.
While the Wav2Vec2 baseline provides the fastest inference speed, Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo achieves substantially stronger recognition quality while maintaining practical real-time performance.
Among the evaluated models, Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo provides the best overall quality-speed tradeoff for Kazakh speech recognition workloads.
If your company or organization uses this model, has evaluated it, or has found it useful, I would greatly appreciate a brief official confirmation letter describing the use case or evaluation results. Such documentation helps demonstrate the model's real-world impact in my university applications. The letter can be sent to the email address above.
Citation
bibtex
1@misc{sovetkhan2026kazakhwhisper,
2 title={Kazakh Whisper Large-v3 Turbo},
3 author={Shyngys Sovetkhan},
4 year={2026},
5 howpublished={Hugging Face Model Hub},
6 url={https://huggingface.co/shyngys879/kazakh-whisper-large-v3-turbo}
7}