cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026: transcribe.cpp GGUF

GGUF conversions of CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026 for use with transcribe.cpp.

Ported from upstream commit 0a8193c, pinned 2026-07-07. Validated against the Transformers reference at transcribe.cpp commit d89ecb7 on 2026-07-07.

Offline Arabic speech-to-text, including dialectal Arabic and Arabic-English code-switching, with English as a secondary language. An Arabic-focused adaptation of the Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 architecture: a Conformer encoder with a Transformer encoder-decoder head (cross-attention, tied token embedding). Takes a 16 kHz mono WAV and a language flag (-l ar or -l en) and produces a transcript. Decoding is autoregressive.

Downloads

WER on the full FLEURS ar split (428 utterances), batch size 8, timestamps none. Figures without a commit were published before provenance was recorded.

Greedy decoding, no external LM, scored with the Whisper BasicTextNormalizer; the FLEURS Arabic split is ar_eg, Egyptian-dialect speech. BF16 reference baseline, measured with native Transformers on the same manifest: 11.00%; the BF16 port scores 11.02%, and every quant falls inside the reference's 95% confidence interval. FLEURS Arabic is Egyptian-dialect speech; upstream numbers published on other Arabic test sets are not directly comparable.

Usage

Build transcribe.cpp from source:

git clone git@github.com:handy-computer/transcribe.cpp.git
cd transcribe.cpp
cmake -B build && cmake --build build

Run on a 16 kHz mono WAV:

build/bin/transcribe-cli \
  -m cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026-Q8_0.gguf \
  -l ar \
  input.wav

If your audio isn't already 16 kHz mono WAV, convert it first:

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -ar 16000 -ac 1 output.wav

See the transcribe.cpp model page for performance numbers, numerical validation, and reproduction steps.

License

Inherited from the base model: Apache-2.0. See the upstream model card for full terms.

Original Model Card

The section below is reproduced from CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026 at commit 0a8193c for offline reference. The upstream card is the authoritative source.

Cohere Transcribe Arabic

Cohere Transcribe Arabic is an open source release of a 2B parameter dedicated audio-in, text-out automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. The optimized for Arabic and English, with a focus on Arabic dialect performance and Arabic-English code-switching. Based on the Cohere Transcribe architecture.

Developed by: Cohere and Cohere Labs. Point of Contact: Cohere Labs.

✨Try the Cohere Transcribe Arabic demo✨

Usage

Cohere Transcribe Arabic is supported natively in transformers. This is the recommended way to use the model for offline inference. For online inference, see the vLLM integration example below.

pip install transformers>=5.4.0 torch huggingface_hub soundfile librosa sentencepiece protobuf accelerate

Quick Start 🤗

Transcribe any audio file in a few lines:

from transformers import AutoProcessor, CohereAsrForConditionalGeneration
from transformers.audio_utils import load_audio
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026")
model = CohereAsrForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026", device_map="auto")

# Example: transcribe Arabic audio
audio_file = "your_audio.wav"
audio = load_audio(audio_file, sampling_rate=16000)

inputs = processor(audio, sampling_rate=16000, return_tensors="pt", language="ar")
inputs.to(model.device, dtype=model.dtype)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
text = processor.decode(outputs, skip_special_tokens=True)
print(text)

For audio longer than the feature extractor's max_audio_clip_s, the feature extractor automatically splits the waveform into chunks. The processor reassembles the per-chunk transcriptions using the returned audio_chunk_index.

from transformers import AutoProcessor, CohereAsrForConditionalGeneration
import time

processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026")
model = CohereAsrForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026", device_map="auto")

audio = load_audio("your_long_audio.wav", sampling_rate=16000)
sr = 16000
duration_s = len(audio) / sr
print(f"Audio duration: {duration_s / 60:.1f} minutes")

inputs = processor(audio=audio, sampling_rate=sr, return_tensors="pt", language="ar")
audio_chunk_index = inputs.get("audio_chunk_index")
inputs.to(model.device, dtype=model.dtype)

start = time.time()
outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
text = processor.decode(outputs, skip_special_tokens=True, audio_chunk_index=audio_chunk_index, language="ar")[0]
elapsed = time.time() - start
rtfx = duration_s / elapsed
print(f"Transcribed in {elapsed:.1f}s — RTFx: {rtfx:.1f}")
print(text)

The model also supports English. Specify language="en":

inputs = processor(audio, sampling_rate=16000, return_tensors="pt", language="en")
inputs.to(model.device, dtype=model.dtype)

outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=256)
text = processor.decode(outputs, skip_special_tokens=True)
print(text)

vLLM Integration

For production serving we recommend running via vLLM following the instructions below.

First install vLLM (refer to vLLM installation instructions):

uv venv --python 3.12 --seed
source .venv/bin/activate

uv pip install -U vllm==0.19.0 --torch-backend=auto
uv pip install vllm[audio]
uv pip install librosa

Start vLLM server

vllm serve CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026 --trust-remote-code

Send request

curl -v -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/transcriptions \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer $VLLM_API_KEY" \
-F "file=@$(realpath ${AUDIO_PATH})" \
-F "model=CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-arabic-07-2026"

Results

Link to the live leaderboard: Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard.

Resources

For more details and results:

• Technical blog post contains WERs and other quality metrics.
• Announcement blog post for more information about the model.
• The Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard.

Strengths and Limitations

Strengths

Cohere Transcribe Arabic demonstrates strong transcription accuracy for Arabic and English. As a dedicated speech recognition model, it benefits from efficient inference via the Conformer encoder-decoder architecture.

Limitations

• Single language. The model performs best when remaining in-distribution of a single, pre-specified language. It does not feature explicit, automatic language detection and exhibits inconsistent performance on code-switched audio.

• Timestamps/Speaker diarization. The model does not feature either of these.

• Silence. Like most AED speech models, Cohere Transcibe Arabic is eager to transcribe, even non-speech sounds. The model benefits from prepending a noise gate or VAD (voice activity detection) model in order to prevent low-volume, floor noise from turning into hallucinations.

Model Card Contact

For errors or additional questions about details in this model card, contact labs@cohere.com or raise an issue.

Terms of Use: We hope that the release of this model will make community-based research efforts into Arabic speech more accessible. This model is governed by an Apache 2.0 license.