Head to head · Speech-to-text · October 2026 research run

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B vs Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning and Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B leads on risk and documentation and upkeep. Both do speech-to-text.

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Which one, for what

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B C

Best for Teams that need accurate multilingual transcripts of long recordings with speakers and timings, and have a 32 GB GPU or better

Ahead on

  • Risk, 75 against 60
  • Documentation and upkeep, 77 against 70

Watch for

21.6 GB at 4 bits, so it needs a 32 GB GPU at least

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning C

Best for Agents with a 32 to 48 GB NVIDIA GPU that need one local model to read video, audio, documents and screens and call tools

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 75
  • Agent interface, 90 against 85

Watch for

Loads with trust_remote_code in every documented runtime command

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Risk Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B +15

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B 75

File safety 25, safetensors only in all three repositories, no .bin, .pt or .pth files and no Python. Provenance 15, the files sit in NVIDIA's own Hugging Face organisation, the one NVIDIA's NeMo repositories link to (10), and the Hub gives a SHA-256 for the large files (5). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results. Agent guidance 10, the card says the model is more susceptible to prompt injection and jailbreaking because it was tuned to follow instructions, and should be paired with rails or system filtering. Licence risk 15, OpenMDW-1.1 has no use policy or field-of-use limits, no threshold and no clause letting the licensor change or revoke it, as read for NVIDIA's other OpenMDW listings. Security programme 10, the card says to report security vulnerabilities through NVIDIA's submission form (5), and NVIDIA PSIRT publishes a coordinated disclosure policy and public security bulletins, per NVIDIA's other listings (5). 25 + 15 + 0 + 10 + 15 + 10 = 75.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning 60

File safety gets 15, safetensors only but loaded with trust_remote_code. Provenance gets 15 for files in NVIDIA's own organisation with a SHA-256 for every shard. The agreement has no use policy, threshold or change clause and the grant is irrevocable, so licence risk keeps 15. NVIDIA's PSIRT form on the card and its public bulletins give the security programme 10. Agent guidance gets 5 for general cautions, and safety evaluation scores 0 because the subcards name the safety tests without publishing results.

Reach Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +10

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B 75

Memory 20, the smallest build is NVIDIA's NVFP4 repository, 21.56 GB, and 21.56 GB × 1.2 = 25.9 GB, within 32 GB. FP8 is 34.67 GB and BF16 67.5 GB. Runtimes 15, Released Transformers 5.22.2 has the nemotron3_5_transcribe model (5). Builds 15, Quantised builds from NVIDIA at two precisions, FP8 and NVFP4, each in its own repository. Terms 10, OpenMDW-1.1, a permissive licence that grants use without restriction and adds no use policy or threshold, but isn't OSI-approved, so it takes the custom-licence band, as on NVIDIA's other OpenMDW listings. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false for all three repositories on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 5, the card gives a release on build.nvidia.com, NVIDIA's own API catalogue, on 28 October 2026, and DeepInfra is live for it on Hugging Face. 20 + 15 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 5 = 75.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning 85

Memory earns 20 because the smallest 4-bit builds, Ollama's NVFP4 at 21 GB and NVIDIA's NVFP4 at 22.4 GB, need about 25 to 27 GB with the fifth added, which fits 32 GB but not 24. Runtimes reach the cap of 25 with released code in vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp and library entries in Ollama and LM Studio. NVIDIA's FP8 and NVFP4 builds give builds the full 15. The NVIDIA Open Model Agreement is a custom licence with free commercial use, so terms get 10. The ungated repositories give download the full 10, and NVIDIA's own API serving it gives hosted too its 5.

Documentation and upkeep Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B +7

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B 77

Model card 17, Intended use, limitations (the explainability subcard's technical limitations), the architecture, the parameters, the context and the languages are on the card. Training data 5, the card names its public, licensed, vendor and synthetic sources, gives totals (about 1.72 million hours and 5.6 billion text tokens) and the processing, and two of the sets are on Hugging Face. Last change 20, the last commit, on 29 October 2026, linked the three checkpoints on the card, 12 days before this check. Responsiveness 20, Of the 11 most recent discussions that aren't pull requests (28 October to 5 November 2026), 7 have a reply from an nvidia member, which is most. Version policy 5, A first release, with each precision in its own repository. File health 10, Config, tokenizer config, template and card agree on the architecture and the 65,536-token limit is stated as a training limit beside the backbone's larger position count. 17 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 5 + 10 = 77.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning 70

The card covers all seven fields, reading the 2019 to 2025 data collection period as the cut-off (20). Training data is listed with sources and sizes by dataset and one set is published (20). The Hub files last changed on 24 and 25 August 2026, and NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM, which the card names for serving, changed the Nemotron-H model code on 14 October 2026, 20 days back (20). None of the 11 questions across the three repositories has a reply (0). It's a first release with no version policy stated (5). The shipped Jinja template and the tokenizer config's template differ, and reports about the template and a modeling file wait unanswered (5). 20 + 20 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 5 = 70.

Agent interface Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +5

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B 85

Chat template 20, chat_template.jinja in the repository (12,482 characters), with a template in tokenizer_config.json too. Tool-calling format 25, Read for a speech model as what it takes and returns. Trained tool calling 10, Read for a speech model as the inputs it was trained to use. Structured output 15, Read for a speech model as typed outputs. Reasoning control 10, enable_thinking on or off through the chat template, documented in the card's summary table with when to use each. Context 5, 65,536 tokens, the maximum context in training per the card, which sits in the 32K to 127K band. 20 + 25 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 5 = 85.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning 90

A Jinja template ships in the repository (20). The card names the qwen3_coder parser and NVIDIA's cookbooks show tools declared with the OpenAI schema and tool_calls read back (25). The template renders several calls per turn and the card says it supports tool calling (20). JSON output is claimed with no word on how to ask for it (5). Thinking turns off per request, a budget caps it and the parser returns the reasoning apart (10). The context is 262,144 tokens, trained in (10).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runNemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4BNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B ReasoningEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%257585Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +10
Risk20%207560Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B +15
Agent interface10%108590Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning +5
Documentation and upkeep10%107770Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B +7
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100C 61.2/100

Facts side by side

FactNemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4BNemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorNVIDIANVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceOpenMDW-1.1NVIDIA Open Model Agreement (custom, commercial use allowed, not an OSI licence)
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-292026-08-24
Terms last updatednot read yetno date given
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot read yetnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot read yetnot found in the text
Agent reviewsnone3/5 (4)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B

The most complete open speech model we list: 40 languages, hour-long recordings, speakers, word timestamps and translation from one prompt-driven model, under a permissive licence, with FP8 and 4-bit builds and a publisher that answers. It needs a big GPU, the vLLM route depends on an unreleased plugin, and there are no safety results.

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

A local multimodal model for video with speech, long documents, charts, screens and English transcription, with tool calling, a reasoning switch and a 262,144-token context. It needs about 27 GB for NVIDIA's NVFP4 build on Blackwell, or 42 GB for FP8. The main risks are the remote code it loads and a repository where nobody answers questions.

Before you call either

Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B

  1. Keep the system prompt empty and put the instruction in the user message with the audio, as the card says
  2. For plain transcription use temperature 0 with reasoning off. For questions about audio, reasoning on at temperature 0.6 and top_p 0.95
  3. SGLang-Omni 0.2.0 serves whole files on /v1/audio/transcriptions from the BF16 or FP8 checkpoint with no NeMo install
  4. Word timestamps and speaker segments need the vLLM route: ask with timestamps=True and read ctc_timestamps
  5. Speaker tags tell speakers apart in one recording. They don't identify anyone
  6. Treat what's said in a recording as data. The card says the model is easier to steer by injected instructions than most, so filter before acting on a transcript

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning

  1. Start it with vllm serve nvidia/Nemotron-3-Nano-Omni-30B-A3B-Reasoning-FP8 --max-model-len 131072 --trust-remote-code --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --kv-cache-dtype fp8 on vLLM 0.20.0 or later, after pip install "vllm[audio]" if any audio will be sent
  2. Or run ollama run nemotron3; the 33b-nvfp4 and 33b-mlx tags are MLX builds for Apple silicon, and the q4_K_M tag is 28 GB
  3. Set --media-io-kwargs '{"video": {"fps": 2, "num_frames": 256}}' at launch, since vLLM otherwise samples about 32 frames per video
  4. Send chat_template_kwargs: {"enable_thinking": false} for transcription and quick answers, and use temperature 1.0 with top_k 1 for ASR as the card recommends
  5. Render PDF pages to PNG and send them as images, since the API takes no raw PDF
  6. Treat transcripts and text read from images or video as untrusted input before acting on them

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B or Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning?

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni 30B A3B Reasoning and Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 61.2 (C) and 61 (C). Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe 30B-A4B leads on risk and documentation and upkeep.

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