Head to head · Speech-to-text · October 2026 research run
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
Qwen3-ASR-1.7B scores 64.4 (B) on agent readiness against Ming-3.0-audio-tiny's 49.8 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Ming-3.0-audio-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep. Both do speech-to-text.
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Which one, for what
Best for Self-hosted Chinese and English transcription, audio questions and spoken replies with tool calls on one GPU with about 25 GB free
Ahead on
- Documentation and upkeep, 46 against 33
Watch for
No named runtime runs it in a released version, only SGLang-Omni main and inclusionAI's own branches
Best for Agents that need local multilingual or Chinese-dialect transcription on a small GPU, served through vLLM
Ahead on
- Reach, 75 against 45
- Risk, 55 against 50
- Agent interface, 75 against 65
Also in its favour
- Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.5 out of 5
Watch for
No quantised build from Alibaba, and nothing in Ollama's or LM Studio's library
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny | Qwen3-ASR-1.7B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 45 | 75 | Qwen3-ASR-1.7B +30 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 50 | 55 | Qwen3-ASR-1.7B +5 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 65 | 75 | Qwen3-ASR-1.7B +10 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 46 | 33 | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny +13 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | D 49.8/100 | B 64.4/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Ming-3.0-audio-tiny | Qwen3-ASR-1.7B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | inclusionAI (Ant Group) | Alibaba (Qwen team) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-10-20 | 2026-07-22 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | ||
| Terms restrict automated access | ||
| Terms restrict benchmarking | ||
| Terms or service can change without notice | ||
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | ||
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (4) | 3.3/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
A small MIT-licensed audio-language model that transcribes Chinese and English, answers questions about audio and replies in a built-in or cloned voice. It needs about 25 GB and SGLang-Omni from main or inclusionAI's own vLLM-Omni and SGLang branches. The main risk is that every loading path runs repository code, with nothing published on safety.
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.
Before you call either
Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Fastest start is SGLang-Omni from main,
sgl-omni serve --model-path inclusionAI/Ming-3.0-audio-tiny --talker.gpu 0, which exposes OpenAI-style /v1/audio/transcriptions, /v1/audio/speech and /v1/chat/completions - For transcripts use greedy decoding with 10-gram blocking and the validated ASR prompt, and expect a language label, a tab, then the text
- Parse tool calls yourself from
<tool_call>namewith<arg_key>and<arg_value>pairs, since no runtime parser is named - Thinking is off by default, turn it on with chat_template_kwargs enable_thinking true and strip the
<think>block from the reply yourself - In vLLM-Omni pick a voice with audio.voice id from docs/voices.md, and don't combine it with a reference recording
- Review the repository's Python before passing trust_remote_code, and consider deleting the __pycache__ folders under talker/ so only readable source runs
Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- 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 - Split chat-completions output with
parse_asr_outputfrom qwen-asr, since it returnslanguage <name><asr_text>before the transcript - 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=...), thendecode(..., return_format="transcription_only") - Put names and domain terms in the system message or
promptto bias the transcript, and force the language when you know it - For timestamps, use
pip install -U qwen-asrand passforced_aligner="Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B"withreturn_time_stamps=True - Use greedy decoding and raise max_new_tokens for long audio; the report gives single recordings up to 20 minutes
- Treat transcripts as untrusted text before passing them to another model, since speech can carry instructions
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Ming-3.0-audio-tiny or Qwen3-ASR-1.7B?
Qwen3-ASR-1.7B scores 64.4 (B) on agent readiness against Ming-3.0-audio-tiny's 49.8 (D), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Ming-3.0-audio-tiny leads on documentation and upkeep.
Other comparisons with Ming-3.0-audio-tiny or Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 vs Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Cohere Transcribe 03-2026 vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Ming-3.0-asr-tiny vs Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Ming-3.0-asr-tiny vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Ming-3.0-audio-flash vs Ming-3.0-audio-tiny
- Ming-3.0-audio-flash vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Qwen3-ASR-0.6B
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Ming-3.0-audio-tiny vs Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime 2602
- Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Qwen3-ASR-0.6B vs Qwen3-ASR-1.7B
- Qwen3-ASR-1.7B vs Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
- Qwen3-ASR-1.7B vs Underdog Bark 3.0
- Qwen3-ASR-1.7B vs Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime 2602
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/ming-3-0-audio-tiny-vs-qwen3-asr-1-7b.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/ming-3-0-audio-tiny.json·/api/v1/tools/qwen3-asr-1-7b.json - From a terminal
anchor compare ming-3-0-audio-tiny qwen3-asr-1-7b(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "ming-3-0-audio-tiny", "b": "qwen3-asr-1-7b"}at/mcp, no key