Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-kk-ru-en

A trilingual Kazakh / Russian / English speech-recognition model, fine-tuned from Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B. It adds Kazakh (which the base model does not recognize) while preserving strong Russian and English transcription, in a single 0.6B model with streaming/offline unified inference.

• Languages: Kazakh (kk), Russian (ru), English (en)
• Base model: Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B (audio encoder → Qwen3 decoder)
• Numbers are emitted as digits (e.g. 1990, 25), not spelled out — no inverse-text-normalization step is needed downstream.
• License: Apache-2.0

Performance

Word/character error rate (%) on held-out public test sets, lower is better. Text is scored with the standard multilingual-Whisper normalization protocol (EnglishTextNormalizer for English, BasicTextNormalizer for Kazakh/Russian).

Test set	Lang	WER	CER
FLEURS (kk_kz, test)	kk	17.80	7.38
FLEURS (ru_ru, test)	ru	12.77	5.38
FLEURS (en_us, test)	en	5.92	3.22
KSC2 (ISSAI, test)	kk	20.42	6.97

FLEURS/KSC2 numbers are measured on a fixed seeded subset (500 utts per FLEURS language; 1000 utts for KSC2). Language is auto-detected for Kazakh and forced to "Russian" / "English" for the other two. See Benchmark below to reproduce.

Installation

The model runs with the official qwen-asr toolkit. Use a fresh environment to avoid dependency conflicts.

pip install -U qwen-asr           # transformers backend
# pip install -U "qwen-asr[vllm]" # add the vLLM backend (faster + streaming)

Usage

import torch
from qwen_asr import Qwen3ASRModel

model = Qwen3ASRModel.from_pretrained(
    "nur-dev/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-kk-ru-en",
    dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="cuda:0",
    max_new_tokens=256,          # raise for long audio
)

# audio can be a local path, URL, base64 string, or an (np.ndarray, sample_rate) tuple
results = model.transcribe(
    audio="speech.wav",
    language=None,               # auto-detect (recommended for Kazakh)
)
print(results[0].language, results[0].text)

Language selection. language=None auto-detects and is recommended for Kazakh. For Russian or English you may force the label to skip detection:

# Batch inference; pass one language per clip (or None to auto-detect each)
results = model.transcribe(
    audio=["kk.wav", "ru.wav", "en.wav"],
    language=[None, "Russian", "English"],
)
for r in results:
    print(r.text)

Serve

OpenAI-compatible server (vLLM)

qwen-asr-serve wraps vllm serve and accepts any vllm serve argument:

pip install -U "qwen-asr[vllm]"
qwen-asr-serve nur-dev/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-kk-ru-en \
    --gpu-memory-utilization 0.8 --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

Send requests to the /v1/chat/completions endpoint:

import requests
from qwen_asr import parse_asr_output

data = {"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": [
    {"type": "audio_url", "audio_url": {"url": "https://example.com/speech.wav"}},
]}]}
resp = requests.post("http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions", json=data, timeout=300)
content = resp.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"]

language, text = parse_asr_output(content)
print(language, text)

vLLM from Python

import torch
from qwen_asr import Qwen3ASRModel

if __name__ == "__main__":            # required by vLLM multiprocessing
    model = Qwen3ASRModel.LLM(
        model="nur-dev/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-kk-ru-en",
        gpu_memory_utilization=0.7,
        max_new_tokens=256,
    )
    out = model.transcribe(audio="speech.wav", language=None)
    print(out[0].text)

Benchmark

Self-contained WER/CER on the full FLEURS test split for each language. Uses the same Whisper normalization protocol as the reported numbers.

pip install -U qwen-asr datasets jiwer transformers

import re, unicodedata, torch, jiwer
from datasets import load_dataset
from qwen_asr import Qwen3ASRModel
from transformers.models.whisper.english_normalizer import (
    BasicTextNormalizer, EnglishTextNormalizer,
)

basic, english = BasicTextNormalizer(), EnglishTextNormalizer({})
def norm(t, lang):
    t = unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", t or "")
    t = english(t) if lang == "en" else basic(t)
    return re.sub(r"\s+", " ", t).strip()

# FLEURS config name + language to force ("Kazakh" is auto-detected → None)
CFG = {"kk": ("kk_kz", None), "ru": ("ru_ru", "Russian"), "en": ("en_us", "English")}

model = Qwen3ASRModel.from_pretrained(
    "nur-dev/Qwen3-ASR-0.6B-kk-ru-en",
    dtype=torch.bfloat16, device_map="cuda:0", max_new_tokens=256,
)

for lang, (cfg, force) in CFG.items():
    ds = load_dataset("google/fleurs", cfg, split="test")
    refs = [ex["transcription"] for ex in ds]
    auds = [(ex["audio"]["array"].astype("float32"), ex["audio"]["sampling_rate"]) for ex in ds]
    hyps = []
    for i in range(0, len(auds), 32):
        batch = auds[i:i + 32]
        hyps += [o.text for o in model.transcribe(audio=batch, language=[force] * len(batch))]
    R = [norm(r, lang) for r in refs]
    H = [norm(h, lang) for h in hyps]
    pairs = [(r, h) for r, h in zip(R, H) if r]
    R, H = [p[0] for p in pairs], [p[1] for p in pairs]
    print(f"{lang}: WER={100 * jiwer.wer(R, H):.2f}  CER={100 * jiwer.cer(R, H):.2f}  n={len(R)}")

The headline table uses a fixed 500-utterance seeded subset per language; this script runs the full FLEURS test split, so expect results within ~1 WER point.

Acknowledgements

Built on Qwen3-ASR by the Qwen team, and evaluated with FLEURS and the ISSAI Kazakh Speech Corpus 2 (KSC2). Released under Apache-2.0, following the base model's license.