Qwen3 ASR 1.7B
Qwen · Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
Speech to textTranscribes a recording into words
- Type
- Open weightsApache License 2.0
- Languages
- 52
- Size
- 2B
Context measured in tokens
Our take
Written Aug 2, 2026Qwen3 ASR is a tiny downloadable speech-to-text model from Qwen that turns audio into written words. It runs extremely fast on benchmark hardware and carries a permissive Apache licence, though its accuracy on challenging audio drops sharply and no hosted offers are currently available.
Pick this for offline or self-hosted transcription where licence permissiveness matters — Apache 2.0 allows commercial use and modification. Use it for batch processing of large audio archives, or for multilingual deployment needing broad language coverage. Skip it if you need verified accuracy beyond English, hosted availability without self-hosting, or reliable transcription of accented speech or recorded meetings.
The case for it
- Extremely fast transcription for batch workloads: 394 times real time, processing roughly an hour of audio in 9 seconds on benchmark hardware.
- Strong performance on clean read-aloud audio, with a word error rate of 1.24% versus 5.0% overall on the Open ASR benchmark.
- Permissive open licence with no usage restrictions: Apache License 2.0 permits commercial use, redistribution and modification.
- Broad language coverage relative to model size: 52 languages supported at 2.04 billion parameters.
The case against it
- Accuracy collapses on challenging real-world audio: 9.88% word error rate on accented speech, nearly eight times worse than on clean read speech; 8.31% on recorded meetings.
- No verified pricing or hosted availability: zero offers currently in our catalogue, with no release date disclosed.
- English-only accuracy verification despite multilingual claims: all accuracy figures we hold are English-only, with no source measuring the other 51 languages.
How good is it?
TranscriptionTurning speech into text4 of 5Open ASR WER · 15th of 74
95%
Misses roughly one word in 20, averaged over nine English test sets.
394×43rd of 62
an hour of audio in 9 seconds, on the board's own hardware. Your machine will differ.
52
Stated by the leaderboard; we do not hold the list itself.
Percentage of words wrong on each set, lower better. Bars are scaled to this model's own worst case, not to the board.
The figures above come from the Open ASR Leaderboard, an independent public test that runs every model on the same recordings. It is the only measurement of transcription quality we know of, so there are no other scores to show.
These tests check whether a model follows instructions — a precondition for all the work above, but not a measure of how well that work is done, which is why they get no rating.
Every published score for this model9 scoresEvery figure we hold, from 9 boards, with who ran it and a link to the source — including the boards no rating above is built on.
Can you run it yourself?
- Fits in memory
- weights load entirely on the card
- Spills to system RAM
- some weights offload; much slower
- Too large
- will not load even with offload
- est
- size is calculated; the verdict could change by 10%
Comfortable fit
GeForce RTX 4090 · 24 GB
Room to spare. 20.2 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.
GeForce RTX 5090 · 32 GB
Room to spare. 28.2 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.
Apple M2 (8-core GPU, 8GB unified) · 8 GB
Room to spare. 3.4 GB spare means a 10% error in the size would not change the answer.
Memory use by level
Against a 24 GB card.
All 3 sizes here are calculated, not measured. We hold no measured file for this model, so each size comes from the parameter count and every verdict above inherits that uncertainty.
Check against your own machine → · All 71 devices, with every size →
Models people weigh against Qwen3 ASR 1.7B
When we formed this view
Dates behind this page
Prices last checked 7h ago
What we do not know about this model yet
- We hold no measured file for it, so all 3 sizes on this page are calculated from the parameter count.
- Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
Licence and identifiers
What the licence allowsApache License 2.0, what it allows commercially, and the identifiers you need to pull this model — its Hugging Face repo, our slug and a machine-readable card.
Licence
Apache License 2.0
Fully permissive: commercial use, redistribution, and derivatives allowed. Requires attribution and a copy of the license. Includes an express patent grant.
Identifiers
- Hugging Face
- Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Modality record
- audio->text
- Catalogue slug
- qwen-qwen3-asr-1-7b