IBM introduces Granite 4.0 1B Speech, a compact voice model designed for enterprise applications on devices with limited resources. What does this mean for you in practice? Fewer parameters, better accuracy in English, faster inference, and broader language support — now including Japanese — plus keyword-list biasing for names and acronyms.

What is Granite 4.0 1B Speech

Granite 4.0 1B Speech is the reduced and optimized version of IBM’s Granite Speech family. It has roughly half the parameters of its predecessor granite-speech-3.3-2b, yet achieves better transcription results in English. It’s built for two main tasks:

• ASR (automatic speech recognition) multilingual.
• AST (bidirectional automatic speech translation).

It supports English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. Two notable additions: ASR support for Japanese and biasing via word lists (useful for names, brands, and acronyms), both highly requested by the community.