Open model · Nepali ASR
A 119M-parameter Nepali Conformer-RNNT for open speech recognition, released with full evidence, artifact hashes, and a reproducible benchmark. Shares rank #1 of 19 evaluated systems.
Open on Hugging Face GitHub repo ReproducibilityNepali speech recognition
Kriti is a 119M-parameter Nepali-only RNN-Transducer. It shares rank one on the development benchmark and records the lowest raw word error rate in the evaluated field of 19 systems.
Benchmark — 3,630-utterance dev set, 19 systems
| Metric | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Primary WER | 24.08% | Punctuation-insensitive — ties with AI4Bharat IndicConformer RNNT |
| Raw WER | 24.69% | Lowest raw WER across all 19 systems |
| CER | 8.29% | Character error rate on the same benchmark |
Frozen 3,630-utterance dev view. Exact replicate hashes in the reproducibility repo.
Why it matters
Before Kriti, every competitive Nepali ASR system was proprietary or inaccessible. Kriti matches the best published system at 119M parameters and ships the full evidence: weights, model card, the frozen benchmark view, and artifact hashes anyone can check.
Architecture
Seventeen Conformer blocks feed a Nepali-only RNN-Transducer. A separate 1,025-parameter acoustic head — pooled encoder output into a logistic layer, threshold 0.711 — decides when a terminal Devanagari danda (।) belongs in the transcript. Multilingual heads from the base model are pruned; only Nepali decoding paths remain.
Training data
402,905 clips from OpenSLR 54 (153k clips), OpenSLR 43 (2k), FLEURS Nepali (4.3k), and AI4Bharat IndicVoices (242k). All sources are public. The model adapts AI4Bharat IndicConformer (commit cd09ba7) with the multilingual graph removed and a Nepali-only graph added.
Specifications
Parameters
119,462,146
Architecture
Conformer + RNNT
Audio input
16 kHz
Training audio
630.3 hours
Training clips
402,905
License
MIT
Model family
Kriti V1 is the wideband (16 kHz) foundation. Kriti Telephony adapts the same architecture to narrowband phone audio — call-centers, IVR, code-switched spontaneous Nepali — and achieves new state of the art on the NepTel benchmark.
See Kriti Telephony