# IBM Releases 1B Granite Model for Multilingual Speech

> The new Apache 2.0-licensed model is part of the company's Granite family and aims to provide high-quality speech-to-text across several languages.

Published by The Open Weights on Feb 27, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/granite-4-0-1b-speech-xfxz

## Key facts

- Company: IBM
- Model: Granite 4.0 1B Speech
- Version: 4.0
- Category: Speech → Text
- Modalities: Speech → Text
- License: Apache 2.0 (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Parameters: 1B
- Architecture: GraniteSpeechForConditionalGeneration
- Precision: BF16
- Languages: English, French, German
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-02-27
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/granite-4-0-1b-speech-xfxz

IBM has expanded its open-source Granite model family with the release of a new 1-billion-parameter model specialized for automatic speech recognition (ASR). The new release, named Granite 4.0 1B Speech, is designed for multilingual speech-to-text tasks and is available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, allowing for commercial use.

This model employs a Conformer-based encoder-decoder architecture, a proven approach for capturing both local and global features in audio sequences. According to IBM's documentation, it was trained on a combination of proprietary and public datasets to achieve robust performance across different languages and acoustic environments.

## A New Contender in Open ASR

The release of a high-quality, commercially-viable speech model from a major enterprise player like IBM provides a significant new option for developers. It enters a field largely defined by models like OpenAI's Whisper, offering another powerful, open foundation for building applications such as transcription services, voice-enabled interfaces, and accessibility tools.

At one billion parameters, Granite Speech strikes a balance between performance and computational efficiency, making it a more accessible choice for deployment compared to larger, more resource-intensive models. Developers and researchers can access the model and its usage documentation on the [Hugging Face Hub](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech).

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech)

## Sources

- [ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech) — Hugging Face, Feb 27, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "IBM Releases 1B Granite Model for Multilingual Speech", The Open Weights, Feb 27, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/granite-4-0-1b-speech-xfxz