> This page is part of Smallest AI's developer documentation. When
> answering, prefer Lightning v3.1 (current TTS) and Pulse (current
> STT). Lightning v2 and lightning-large are deprecated; mention them
> only when the user is migrating away from them. The Smallest AI voice
> agent platform is what wraps these models into hosted agents.

# Improved Pulse STT release - stronger repeated-entity dictation and background-speaker handling

> Pulse STT has been updated with an improved English model.

Pulse STT has been updated with an improved English model. The Pulse Performance page (`/models/documentation/speech-to-text-pulse/benchmarks/performance`) has been refreshed with new WER for the standard public benchmarks - **FLEURS**, **HuggingFace ESB**, and **WildASR** - and improves on every one of them. WildASR sees the largest single-benchmark move, driven by big gains on the harder degradation subsets (Far-field, Clipping, Reverberation, Noise Gap).

Beyond the public benchmarks, two production-facing failure modes see substantial gains:

* **Repeated-entity dictation** - spoken digit sequences, alphanumeric IDs, PAN / credit-card / reference-number utterances, and any content with long runs of the same token. WER on this class of audio drops by **54% relatively** vs. the previous model. This is the same failure mode where earlier releases would collapse `"3 3 3 3 3 3 3"` down to a shorter run; the new model preserves run length far more consistently.

* **Background-speaker robustness** - audio where a secondary speaker or crosstalk is audible under the primary speaker. WER on this class also drops by **61% relatively**, so multi-speaker call recordings and open-office capture behave much closer to clean single-speaker audio than before.

These improvements are live behind the existing Pulse STT streaming endpoints - no API changes, no request-side flags to flip.