TII Releases Falcon-ASR: 1.6B Arabic Speech Model Hits 20.92% WER

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) launched Falcon-ASR, a 1.6B parameter Arabic speech recognition model focused on the Emirati dialect, achieving a 20.92% average word error rate across six Arabic test sets, outperforming previous models. Falcon-ASR also transcribes English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, but currently is accessible only via a hosted demo without published weights or API.