Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo ยท GGUF

Audar's proprietary Arabic speech-recognition model โ€” leaderboard-grade, dialect-aware.

From Arabic to the world.

License Task Format Params Open-AR-ASR CommonVoice Emirati

๐Ÿงญ Overview ยท ๐Ÿ“Š Benchmarks ยท ๐Ÿ’ป GGUF Deploy ยท ๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Streaming ยท โ˜๏ธ Audar API ยท ๐Ÿ“œ License


๐Ÿงญ What it is

Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo is Audar's proprietary Arabic speech-recognition model โ€” the accuracy tier of the Audar-ASR family. It recasts transcription as audio-conditioned next-token prediction over a unified text vocabulary (a language-model decoder rather than a CTC or transducer objective), and is developed in-house through a proprietary Arabic training program:

  • ๐Ÿงฑ Large-scale dialectal pretraining โ€” 300,000+ hours of Arabic audio spanning MSA, Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine and Maghrebi speech, code-switching, and diverse acoustic channels.
  • ๐ŸŽฏ Dialect-targeted fine-tuning โ€” hardness sampling and multi-task conditioning focused on proper nouns, code-switching, and dialect-faithful orthography.
  • ๐Ÿง  GRPO reinforcement-learning alignment โ€” preference optimization against Arabic-native failure modes (diacritization, code-switching, named-entity preservation, formatting) with trained native annotators.

The result is state-of-the-art dialectal Arabic ASR โ€” the lowest average WER of any evaluated system on the Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard. It transcribes MSA and every major Arabic dialect, code-switched Arabicโ€“English, and English, across 30 languages in total. For real-time, edge, or high-throughput deployment, see the smaller Audar-ASR-V1-Flash.

Distributed in the widely-supported Qwen3-ASR architecture format for turnkey tooling (llama.cpp / GGUF). The model โ€” data, training curriculum, and alignment โ€” is Audar's.

Model summary

ModelAudar-ASR-V1-Turbo โ€” proprietary Arabic ASR (accuracy tier)
TaskAutomatic speech recognition (audio โ†’ text)
ApproachGenerative ASR โ€” audio encoder + language-model decoder (audio-conditioned next-token prediction)
Training300k+ hrs dialectal pretraining โ†’ dialect-targeted SFT โ†’ GRPO alignment
Decoder parameters2,031,739,904 (2.03B)
Audio encoder parameters317,477,504 (0.32B)
Total parameters2,349,217,408 (2.35B, bf16)
Audio input16 kHz mono; 30 s context (longer audio is chunked/streamed)
LanguagesArabic (MSA + Gulf/Egyptian/Levantine/Maghrebi dialects) + English + 28 more
RuntimeGGUF / llama.cpp โ€” CPU ยท GPU ยท edge
LicenseAudarAI Community License v1.0

๐Ÿ“Š Benchmarks

Arabic dialectal ASR is hard โ€” heavily dialectal, conversational, code-switched speech is the frontier for every system. On the Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard, Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo posts the lowest average WER of any evaluated system on the full test sets โ€” 24.7 %, best on four of the six โ€” and 3.55 % WER on CommonVoice-18 Arabic. The per-dataset development-protocol results (100 utterances/benchmark) are below.

Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard โ€” WER % (lower is better)

Per-dataset WER (%), development protocol (100 utterances/benchmark); baselines are the leaderboard's published full-test scores. Best per column in bold. Authoritative full-test-set average: 24.7 %.

System CommonVoice-18 MASC-clean MASC-noisy MGB-2 SADA Casablanca Avg
Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo 3.55 9.13 16.84 14.01 35.22 62.87 23.60
ElevenLabs Scribe v1 5.74 9.87 19.78 15.15 40.87 66.93 26.39
Qwen3-ASR-1.7B (base) 10.86 15.07 21.12 29.21 50.54 85.25 35.34
Whisper-Large-v3 17.83 24.66 34.63 16.26 55.96 71.81 36.86

Emirati Arabic

Set WER % CER %
Emirati (Mixat, full 1,585-clip test) 19.4 7.3

On Emirati, the real recognition error is โ‰ˆ 7.3 % โ€” near-parity with spontaneous English โ€” while the residual up to 19.4 % WER is largely orthographic convention (near-miss spelling of the same word, e.g. ุงู†ุชูˆโ†”ุงู†ุชูˆุง, and Latin-vs-Arabic rendering of English loanwords), not misrecognition.

Measured on an internal dialectal validation sample

Same sample and harness as the Flash card โ€” useful for a direct Flash-vs-Turbo comparison (WER/CER %, N clips per set).

Set (dialect) N WER % CER %
SawtArabi (Gulf) 23 13.7 2.7
ArzEn (Egyptian โ‡„ English code-switch) 40 19.9 9.2
MGB-3 (Egyptian broadcast) 40 27.3 10.5
Casablanca (Maghrebi / Moroccan Darija) 40 61.9 28.6

Casablanca 61.9 WER โ‰ˆ the official leaderboard's 62.87 (reproduced in-house) โ€” the numbers line up.

๐Ÿ’ป GGUF inference (llama.cpp)

Turbo runs on llama.cpp via the multimodal (mtmd) path โ€” a quantized decoder GGUF plus a BF16 audio projector (mmproj). Build a recent llama.cpp (with Qwen3-ASR support), then:

./llama-mtmd-cli \
  -m       Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo-Q8_0.gguf \
  --mmproj mmproj-Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo.gguf \
  --audio  clip.wav \
  -sys     "ูุฑู‘ุบ ุงู„ูƒู„ุงู… ุงู„ุนุฑุจูŠ ุงู„ุชุงู„ูŠ." \
  --temp 0

โš ๏ธ The audio projector (mmproj) must stay BF16 (its ClippableLinear is numerically sensitive). The decoder quantizes normally.

Prefer a managed endpoint? The Audar-ASR family is also available via the Audar API/SDK โ€” streaming, speaker-attributed transcription, and diarization, production-hosted.

GGUF variants

File Approx. size Notes
Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo-Q4_K_M.gguf ~1.28 GB Smallest; constrained hardware
Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo-Q8_0.gguf ~2.16 GB Near-lossless (recommended)
Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo.gguf (BF16) ~4.07 GB Full precision decoder
mmproj-Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo.gguf ~0.64 GB BF16 audio encoder โ€” required, keep BF16

๐ŸŽ™๏ธ Real-time streaming

Audar-ASR streams via LocalAgreement-2: as audio arrives the trailing window is re-decoded each hop and a word is committed only once two consecutive decodes agree on it โ€” giving stable, low-latency incremental output over the GGUF runtime. Audar's production realtime engine serves the same policy over an OpenAI-Realtime-compatible WebSocket with model-based endpointing and โ‰ฅ64 concurrent streams on a single A100-80GB.

๐ŸŒ Languages, dialects & tasks

  • Primary: Arabic โ€” MSA and dialectal (Gulf/Emirati, Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi), plus code-switched Arabicโ€“English; emits dialect-faithful orthography from audio alone.
  • Also: English + 28 additional languages.
  • Task: transcription (audio โ†’ UTF-8 text), prompt-steerable for language and formatting.

Intended use & limitations

Intended use. Broadcast/media transcription, meeting & contact-center intelligence, voice agents, captioning, and accessibility โ€” cloud or on-prem.

Limitations.

  • Maghrebi / Moroccan Darija (Casablanca) remains the hardest condition (~63 % WER) for all systems.
  • Heavily code-switched telephony and low-SNR audio degrade accuracy relative to clean MSA.
  • Long-form audio can drift on very long recordings.
  • Not evaluated for, and must not be used for, covert speaker identification.

๐Ÿ“œ License

Released under the AudarAI Community License v1.0 โ€” research and limited commercial use for qualifying Community Entities; enterprise / large-scale / MaaS use requires an AudarAI Enterprise License. See audarai.com/license/audarai-community-license-v1.0.

Citation

@misc{audar-asr-turbo-2026,
  title  = {Audar-ASR: Dialect-Aware Arabic Speech Recognition},
  author = {AudarAI},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/audarai/Audar-ASR-V1-Turbo}
}

About AudarAI

Leading Arabic-First Multilingual Audio Intelligence

AudarAI starts with Arabic โ€” and expands to the world.

We are building advanced multilingual audio intelligence that helps individuals, enterprises, and governments communicate across languages, cultures, and borders. By combining Arabic-first speech technology with global multilingual AI, AudarAI transforms voice into understanding, interaction, and connection.

Our work spans speech recognition, speech understanding, voice-enabled digital assistants, human-computer interaction, and intelligent audio systems designed for real-world impact. From empowering people to access technology in their native language to helping organizations communicate globally, AudarAI is shaping a future where every voice can be heard, understood, and connected.

Arabic-first. Multilingual by design. Human-centered at heart.

๐ŸŒ www.audarai.com ยท ๐Ÿค— Hugging Face ยท GitHub ยท contact@audarai.com

ยฉ 2026 AUDARAI PTE. LTD. ยท Licensed under the AudarAI Community License v1.0

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