> 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.

# East Asian languages

> Pulse streaming accuracy on Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean across public datasets, served from the US region.

## East Asian languages - Multi-dataset (Streaming)

WER for the four East Asian languages on the streaming endpoint (US region). Three datasets per language covering read speech (FLEURS), conversational/crowdsourced speech (Common Voice 25), and language-specific corpora (JSUT, Zeroth-Korean, MDCC, AISHELL-1). Compared head-to-head against Deepgram Nova-3. Lower WER is better.

| Lang          | Dataset        | Smallest Pulse | Deepgram Nova 3 |
| :------------ | :------------- | :------------: | :-------------: |
| **Japanese**  | CV-25          |   **23.84%**   |      34.81%     |
| **Japanese**  | FLEURS         |   **10.78%**   |      17.11%     |
| **Japanese**  | JSUT BASIC5000 |   **11.47%**   |      11.65%     |
| **Korean**    | CV-25          |      9.79%     |    **9.66%**    |
| **Korean**    | FLEURS         |    **7.95%**   |      10.79%     |
| **Korean**    | Zeroth-Korean  |    **5.25%**   |      6.46%      |
| **Cantonese** | CV-25          |    **6.16%**   |      14.09%     |
| **Cantonese** | FLEURS         |   **13.06%**   |      15.43%     |
| **Cantonese** | MDCC           |    **5.85%**   |      12.77%     |
| **Mandarin**  | CV-25          |   **15.99%**   |      22.44%     |
| **Mandarin**  | FLEURS         |     14.25%     |    **13.89%**   |
| **Mandarin**  | AISHELL-1      |    **7.34%**   |      8.69%      |
| **Average**   | -              |   **10.91%**   |      15.50%     |

Pulse averages **10.91% WER** vs Deepgram Nova-3's **15.50%** across the four East Asian languages - Pulse leads on 10 of 12 dataset rows, with the largest gains on Japanese CV-25 and Cantonese CV-25.

These four languages stream from `wss://api.us.smallest.ai/waves/v1/stt/live?model=pulse` only (US region). See the [Pulse model card](/model-cards/speech-to-text/pulse#supported-languages--streaming) for the region-routing details.