ሆሄ ASR, Amharic speech to text

A hohe is a letter of the Ge'ez alphabet, the character itself. This model turns Amharic speech into those letters, and it is the first of the Hohe family.

Amharic speech in, Amharic text out. One pass over the audio, no word by word generation, so it runs about five times faster than a Whisper of similar accuracy and it does not invent sentences when nobody is speaking.

Trained on 880 hours of Amharic: read speech, five regional dialects, broadcast and interview recordings, phone calls, and conversation from the internet. It is meant for real audio, so it was trained through noise, rooms, 8 kHz phone lines and clips up to a minute long.

16.1% word error and 5.4% character error on our held out test set, whose speakers appear nowhere in training.

If you downloaded this before 5 October 2026

Re-download it. The original v1.0 tag was cut before lm/am-5gram.bin was committed, so pinning that tag gave you a model without the language model this card describes, and every number here is quoted with it. lm/decoder.json also shipped alpha and beta as null, with the tuned 0.3 and 0.5 recorded only in eval/results.json, so a decoder built from that file was an untuned one.

Both are fixed. v1.0 has been re-cut over the complete file set and v1.0.1 points at the same contents, so either tag is now correct. Nothing about the weights changed.

How to use it

import soundfile as sf, torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCTC, AutoProcessor

proc = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("snapwre/hohe-asr-amharic")
model = AutoModelForCTC.from_pretrained("snapwre/hohe-asr-amharic").eval()

audio, sr = sf.read("clip.wav")          # 16 kHz mono
x = proc(audio, sampling_rate=16000, return_tensors="pt")
with torch.inference_mode():
    logits = model(**x).logits
print(proc.batch_decode(logits.argmax(-1))[0])

With the language model, which is what the numbers above are

The 5-gram that ships in lm/ is worth about 14% of the word errors. Its two weights were tuned on development data only, never on a test set, and they are in lm/decoder.json.

from pyctcdecode import build_ctcdecoder
import json

cfg = json.load(open("lm/decoder.json"))
vocab = proc.tokenizer.get_vocab()
labels = [""] * (max(vocab.values()) + 1)
for tok, i in vocab.items():
    labels[i] = " " if tok == "|" else ("" if i == proc.tokenizer.pad_token_id else tok)

decoder = build_ctcdecoder(labels, "lm/am-5gram.bin", alpha=cfg["alpha"], beta=cfg["beta"])
print(decoder.decode(logits[0].numpy()))

The model writes an [AMH] tag at the start of its output. Strip it.

Running it as a service

If you want it behind an HTTP endpoint rather than in a script, the server we run ourselves is open, and it needs no account of ours:

git clone https://github.com/snapwre/hohe-serve && cd hohe-serve
docker build -t hohe-asr . && docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 hohe-asr
curl -F audio=@clip.ogg http://localhost:8080/transcribe

It fetches these weights on first start, quantises them to int8 for the processor, and streams the transcript back as it works, cutting long audio at its quietest instants so the text arrives in pieces rather than all at the end. The repository also holds how we deploy it on AWS spot behind an internal load balancer, and the measurements behind the speed claims above.

What it scores

Character and word error, corpus level, after the usual Amharic normalisation (Ge'ez homophones folded, punctuation dropped). Greedy is the model alone; the second pair is with the language model included here.

For comparison, on the same test set and the same scoring, the strongest open Amharic model we could find scores 0.1052 CER and 0.2770 WER, and on dialect 0.1327 and 0.3100. It is better than this model on spontaneous podcast speech (0.2865 CER), where this one is close behind.

Everything above is reproducible from eval/results.json, which holds every set, both decodes, and the clip counts.

What it is not good at

Spontaneous conversation. Around 47% word error on podcast speech: usable for search or for drafting a transcript a person will fix, not for reading unattended.

Numbers. It spells them out, because its training text does. "12" comes back as አስራ ሁለት. If you need digits, convert after.

Punctuation and case. It writes neither. Sentences come back as words.

Overlapping speakers. One voice at a time. Two people talking together will come back mangled.

Other languages. Amharic only. Oromo, Tigrinya or English audio will produce Amharic-looking nonsense rather than an error.

What it learned from

880 hours of Amharic, every clip screened first for bandwidth, loudness, clipping, silence, and agreement between the transcript it came with and an independent model.

Kept on purpose: background noise, room echo, 8 kHz phone audio, dialects, and clips up to a minute. Dropped: audio too band-limited to carry speech, clipped recordings, clips with little speech in them, and transcripts that disagree with their audio badly enough to be wrong text rather than hard audio.

How it was built

A CTC fine-tune of badrex/Ethio-ASR-multilingual-600M (wav2vec2-BERT, 600M parameters), continued from an earlier fine-tune of ours rather than started again. Two epochs over a fresh 60% of the training set each time, plus the conversational data repeated, at 2e-5 with 300 warmup steps. Checkpoints were chosen on read speech and conversation together, on development data.

30% of training clips were passed through an 8 kHz A-law round trip, which is why the phone line row above is close to the clean one.

Two details that mattered more than they sound. One source ships its transcripts with prefixes and suffixes split off as separate words, which teaches spacing Amharic does not use; those were rejoined. And any training target containing a digit was dropped, so the model has one convention for numbers rather than two.

Trained on one H100 for about ten hours.

Known and measured, not guessed

Every number here comes from a run whose logs, per clip outputs and settings are kept. If you find it does something we did not describe, tell us: the gaps we know about are written above, and the ones we do not know about are worth more to us than the ones we do.

Licence

CC BY 4.0. Use it for anything, including commercially, and say where it came from. The model this one was fine-tuned from is CC BY 4.0, so these weights carry the same terms; the attribution it asks for is in "How it was built" above.

The training corpus is not released with the model and is not covered by this licence.

Built in Addis Ababa by Chapi and the Dataset.ET contributors.