Performance

The solution has various configurations that trade off accuracy and performance. In this page:

  • Realtime streams (RTS) is the number of concurrent streams that can be serviced by a single accelerator using default settings.
  • Compute latency 99th-percentile (CL99) is the 99th-percentile compute latency, which measures how long it takes for a model to make a prediction for one audio frame. Note that CL99 increases with the number of concurrent streams.
  • User-perceived latency (UPL) is the time difference between when the user finishes saying a word and when it is returned as a transcript by the system.
  • WER is the Word Error Rate, a measure of the accuracy of the model. Lower is better.
  • HF Leaderboard WER is the WER of the model on the Huggingface Open ASR Leaderboard. WER is averaged across 8 test datasets.

The WERs in the following section are for models trained on 154k hours of mostly open-source data described at the bottom of this page.

The UPL were computed by streaming librispeech-dev-clean audio live to an FPGA backend server on-site. Please refer to this document for more details on latencies.

Monolingual

The solution supports decoding with a beam search (default beam width=4) with an n-gram language model for improved accuracy. The solution supports greedy decoding for higher throughput.

Note: RTS has two values, the first/larger is without state resetting and the latter/smaller is with state resetting. State resets is a technique that improves the accuracy on long utterances (over 60s) by resetting the model’s hidden state after a fixed duration. This reduces the number of real-time streams that can be supported by around 25%. All the datasets in the HuggingFace benchmark are sufficiently short that state resets have only a minor (i.e. <.2%) effect on WER.

ModelParametersDecodingRTSCL99 at max RTSmedian UPLHF Leaderboard WER
base85Mgreedy2000/160025 ms147 ms10.34%
base85Mbeam, width=41300/120080 ms-9.02%
large196Mgreedy800/65025 ms-9.07%
large196Mbeam, width=4500/40040 ms158 ms8.12%

UPL numbers were computed from librispeech-dev-clean, the effect of state resets is not reflected in measured latencies.

Monolingual models are fine-tuned variants of the multilingual models.

Multilingual

ModelParametersDecodingEnFrEsDeItPt
base85Mgreedy12.73%16.25%12.06%15.87%16.24%20.95%
base85Mbeam, width=410.94%14.13%10.27%14.01%14.44%18.23%
large196Mgreedy11.06%13.46%9.48%12.81%13.93%16.66%
large196Mbeam, width=49.73%11.82%8.39%11.71%12.56%14.93%
  • The RTM/CL99 are the same as the above monolingual table but omitted for space.
  • The WER’s are against the HF leader board datasets