Open ASR Leaderboard | Smallest AI Docs

Pulse Pro: Open ASR Leaderboard

Pulse Pro is tied for #2 on the public Open ASR Leaderboard at 5.42% average WER across eight ESB datasets. Whisper EnglishTextNormalizer applied, normalized WER. Lower is better.

Head-to-head vs leaderboard top-3

Dataset	Pulse Pro	Granite 4.1 2B	Cohere Transcribe
AMI (meetings)	7.32	8.09	8.13
Earnings22	9.04	8.37	10.86
GigaSpeech	9.52	9.80	9.34
LibriSpeech clean	1.73	1.33	1.25
LibriSpeech other	3.74	2.50	2.37
SPGISpeech (financial)	2.04	3.78	3.08
TED-LIUM	3.68	3.07	2.49
VoxPopuli	6.32	5.70	5.87
Average (8 datasets)	5.42	5.33	5.42
Open ASR rank	🥈 #2 (tied)	🥇 #1	🥈 #2 (tied)

Pulse Pro leads on conversational (AMI) and financial (SPGISpeech) workloads. Cohere edges ahead on read speech (LibriSpeech, TED-LIUM).

Position on the public leaderboard

Sorted by ESB average WER. Lower is better. Commercial APIs in our accuracy band:

Rank	Model	ESB Avg WER ↓
1	IBM Granite Speech 4.1 2B	5.33
2	Pulse Pro	5.42
2	Cohere Labs Transcribe (tied)	5.42
3	Zoom Scribe v1	5.47
5	NVIDIA Canary Qwen 2.5B	5.63
8	ElevenLabs Scribe v2	5.83
12	AssemblyAI Universal-3 Pro	6.21
18	Speechmatics Enhanced	6.91
23	OpenAI Whisper Large v3	7.44

FLEURS English

Metric	Pulse Pro
WER (FLEURS en_us)	3.92%
CER (FLEURS en_us)	1.73%

Throughput

Measured on 1× NVIDIA L40S (48 GB), long-form audio.

Mode	Throughput (RTFx)
No word timestamps	250–300×
With word timestamps	~200×

L4 is the recommended production GPU and runs at lower throughput than the L40S reference. See Cloud deployment for sizing.