# Zhipu AI Releases Compact Bilingual Speech Model

> The new GLM-ASR-Nano model is designed for efficient automatic speech recognition in both English and Mandarin Chinese.

Published by The Open Weights on Dec 9, 2025. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/glm-asr-nano-2512-jz26

## Key facts

- Company: Zhipu AI
- Model: GLM-ASR-Nano-2512
- Version: 2512
- Category: Speech → Text
- Modalities: Speech → Text
- License: MIT (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Architecture: GlmAsrForConditionalGeneration
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 4.5 GB
- Languages: English, Chinese, Cantonese
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2025-12-09
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-ASR-Nano-2512
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/glm-asr-nano-2512-jz26

Zhipu AI, a major contributor to the open-source LLM space with its GLM series, has expanded into a new modality with the release of GLM-ASR-Nano-2512. The new model is purpose-built for automatic speech recognition (ASR), or converting spoken language into written text.

The model's key feature is its compact design, making it a strong candidate for applications that require efficiency and lower computational resources, such as on-device transcription. This approach provides an alternative to larger, cloud-dependent models, offering developers more flexibility for privacy-conscious or offline use cases.

## Key Features

*   **Bilingual:** The model is designed to handle both English and Mandarin Chinese, two of the world's most widely spoken languages.
*   **Compact Size:** As a "Nano" model with under one billion parameters, it prioritizes performance on consumer-grade hardware.
*   **Permissive License:** Its release under the MIT license allows for broad adoption, including in commercial products, without significant restrictions.

This release signals Zhipu AI's ambition to build a broader ecosystem of models beyond text generation. By providing a permissively licensed, bilingual ASR tool, the company is offering a valuable building block for developers and competing in a space largely defined by models like OpenAI's Whisper. You can find the model and usage instructions on its [Hugging Face repository](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-ASR-Nano-2512).

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-ASR-Nano-2512)

## Sources

- [zai-org/GLM-ASR-Nano-2512](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-ASR-Nano-2512) — Hugging Face, Dec 9, 2025

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Zhipu AI Releases Compact Bilingual Speech Model", The Open Weights, Dec 9, 2025, https://theopenweights.com/news/glm-asr-nano-2512-jz26