# TII Brings Falcon to Speech With New ASR Model

> The team behind the Falcon language models expands into speech-to-text with its first automatic speech recognition release.

Published by The Open Weights on Oct 7, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/falcon-asr-j5hq

## Key facts

- Company: NVIDIA
- Model: Falcon ASR
- Version: Falcon ASR
- Category: Speech → Text
- Modalities: Speech → Text
- License: Other (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-10-07
- Last verified: 2026-10-09
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/falcon-asr-j5hq

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), best known for its Falcon line of open language models, is extending the family into audio. In a post on Hugging Face, the group introduced [Falcon ASR](https://huggingface.co/blog/tiiuae/falcon-asr), its first automatic speech recognition model for turning spoken audio into text.

The release marks a notable step beyond text generation for a group that has been one of the more visible contributors to the open-weights ecosystem. Rather than a new version of an existing model, Falcon ASR is an initial entry in a new modality, pairing the Falcon brand with a speech-to-text capability that developers can build on directly.

## Why it matters

Speech recognition remains one of the most practical building blocks in applied AI, underpinning transcription, voice assistants, captioning, and multimodal pipelines. A credible open option from an established lab gives teams more freedom to run and adapt ASR on their own terms.

- A first move into audio for the Falcon family
- Positioned as an openly available speech-to-text model
- Published through TII's Hugging Face presence

TII has not detailed every specification in the announcement, and prospective users should check the model card for licensing terms and intended use before deploying. Even so, Falcon ASR signals that the group intends to broaden its footprint across modalities rather than stay confined to language modeling.

## Get the model

- [Announcement](https://huggingface.co/blog/tiiuae/falcon-asr)

## Sources

- [Introducing Falcon ASR](https://huggingface.co/blog/tiiuae/falcon-asr) — Announcement, Oct 7, 2026

---
Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "TII Brings Falcon to Speech With New ASR Model", The Open Weights, Oct 7, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/falcon-asr-j5hq