# TII extends the Falcon family into speech recognition

> The Abu Dhabi lab behind the Falcon language models releases Falcon ASR, an open speech-to-text system.

Published by The Open Weights on Oct 7, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/falcon-asr-g01a

## Key facts

- Company: IBM
- Model: Falcon ASR
- Version: 1
- Category: Speech → Text
- Modalities: Speech → Text
- License: Other (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-10-07
- Last verified: 2026-10-10
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/falcon-asr-g01a

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has released Falcon ASR, its first openly published model aimed at automatic speech recognition. The announcement, posted on [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/blog/tiiuae/falcon-asr), marks an expansion of the Falcon lineup beyond text generation and into transcribing spoken audio into written text.

Until now, the Falcon brand has been best known for its family of open large language models, which helped establish TII as a notable contributor to the open-weights ecosystem. Falcon ASR applies that same open-release philosophy to a different modality, giving developers a speech-to-text option they can download and run directly rather than access only through a paid API.

## Why it matters

Speech recognition remains one of the most practical building blocks in applied AI, underpinning everything from meeting transcription to voice interfaces and accessibility tools. An openly available model from an established lab gives teams more freedom to:

- Deploy transcription on their own infrastructure
- Fine-tune for specific domains, accents, or languages
- Avoid per-minute cloud pricing for high-volume workloads

TII has not published detailed parameter counts or benchmark figures in this record, so the model's accuracy relative to established open systems will become clearer as the community tests it. The release is distributed under a custom license, so prospective users should review the terms before building on it.

For now, Falcon ASR signals that TII intends to compete across more than one modality. Teams interested in the specifics can find the full introduction and model details on the project's [Hugging Face page](https://huggingface.co/blog/tiiuae/falcon-asr).

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "TII extends the Falcon family into speech recognition", The Open Weights, Oct 7, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/falcon-asr-g01a