Abu Dhabi Releases Arabic Speech Model
TII launches Falcon-ASR, a 1.6B parameter model for Arabic and English, reporting a 20.92% average WER on public benchmarks.
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The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) released Falcon-ASR on October 7, a 1.6 billion parameter speech recognition model supporting Arabic, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The model is optimized for the Emirati dialect. TII reports an average Word Error Rate (WER) of 20.92% across six public Arabic test sets, improving upon the previous best published result of 23.17%. In internal evaluations focused on Emirati speech, the model achieved a 22.73% WER, outperforming compared systems like Qwen3-Omni and Audar-ASR.
All performance metrics are self-reported by TII and have not yet been independently reproduced. Model weights and a demo space are available on Hugging Face.