TII releases Falcon-ASR, a 1.6B Arabic speech model with 20.92% WER

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) of Abu Dhabi releases Falcon-ASR, a 1.6B-parameter speech recognition model that transcribes Arabic, including the Emirati dialect, plus English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

In TII's own evaluation, it posts a 20.92% average word error rate across 6 Arabic test sets, 2.25 points better than Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo. The model is available only as a hosted Hugging Face demo, with no weights, license or API published yet.