Granite 4.0 1B Speech: Compact, Multilingual, and Built for the Edge

IBM released Granite 4.0 1B Speech, a compact multilingual speech recognition model designed for resource-limited enterprise devices. Despite having half the parameters of its predecessor, the model delivers better English transcription accuracy and now supports six languages including newly added Japanese, while also introducing keyword list biasing for better name and acronym recognition. The model recently ranked #1 on the OpenASR leaderboard and achieves competitive performance against much larger models, making advanced speech recognition more accessible for edge computing applications.