Best Open Speech Recognition (ASR) Models in 2026: WER, Languages, Latency, and License Compared

Open speech recognition stopped being a Whisper monoculture in 2026. Cohere Transcribe, IBM Granite Speech 4. 1, ARK-ASR and MOSS-Transcribe are now separated by less than one WER point on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard — which means rank no longer decides anything.

This roundup compares 16 open-weight models on word error rate, language coverage, streaming latency and license, and shows why the published averages cannot be subtracted from one another.