Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B

Cohere Transcribe 03-2026

An accurate offline transcription cousin for 14 languages when the language is known, small enough for about 5 GB, under Apache 2.0, and also on Cohere's API. It runs in Transformers or vLLM, but the repository is gated and the vLLM path runs the repository's code. Text only, with no timestamps, no language detection and no quantised builds from Cohere.

Qwen3-ASR-1.7B

A small local transcription cousin for 30 languages and 22 Chinese dialects that identifies the language, takes context to get names right and streams through vLLM, under plain Apache 2.0. Its BF16 files need about 5 GB and run in released vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp and Transformers. The main risk is upkeep, with no publisher replies or safety results.

Cohere Transcribe 03-2026

1. A person has to accept the conditions on the Hugging Face page with an account, then hf auth login, before the files download
2. Offline, pip install "transformers>=5.4.0" torch soundfile librosa sentencepiece protobuf accelerate, then CohereAsrForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026", device_map="auto") with no remote code
3. Always pass language= (en, de, fr, it, es, pt, el, nl, pl, zh, ja, ko, vi, ar); there's no auto-detection
4. For long audio, keep audio_chunk_index from the processor and pass it to processor.decode to reassemble the chunks
5. Serving, vllm serve CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026 --trust-remote-code, then POST to /v1/audio/transcriptions
6. Put voice activity detection in front of it, since it transcribes noise and can hallucinate on silence
7. Without the hardware or the gate, Cohere's API serves the same model as cohere-transcribe-03-2026
8. Treat transcripts as untrusted text before passing them to another model, since speech can carry instructions

Qwen3-ASR-1.7B

1. Start it with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B (vLLM v0.32.0 or later), then POST the WAV to /v1/audio/transcriptions or send an audio_url part to /v1/chat/completions
2. Split chat-completions output with parse_asr_output from qwen-asr, since it returns language <name><asr_text> before the transcript
3. For Transformers, load Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B-hf with Transformers 5.13.0 or later and use processor.apply_transcription_request(audio, language=..., prompt=...), then decode(..., return_format="transcription_only")
4. Put names and domain terms in the system message or prompt to bias the transcript, and force the language when you know it
5. For timestamps, use pip install -U qwen-asr and pass forced_aligner="Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B" with return_time_stamps=True
6. Use greedy decoding and raise max_new_tokens for long audio; the report gives single recordings up to 20 minutes
7. Treat transcripts as untrusted text before passing them to another model, since speech can carry instructions