NeMo Canary

NeMo Canary is NVIDIA's family of multilingual speech models. The original Canary was announced February 2024, transcribing English, Spanish, German, and French with punctuation and capitalization plus bidirectional translation between English and the other three. The follow-up Canary-1b-v2 (August 2025) expanded to 25 European languages on the Granary dataset: a 1B-parameter FastConformer encoder plus Transformer decoder achieving strong WER on AMI and LibriSpeech with up to 10x faster inference than Whisper-large-v3 (vendor-reported).

Canary-1b-v2 is available under CC BY 4.0 on Hugging Face (nvidia/canary-1b-v2), making it one of the few permissively licensed multilingual ASR/AST models, with word-level timestamps and punctuation built in. A compact Canary-180M-Flash variant covers the original four languages for lightweight deployment.