# Microsoft Releases VibeVoice for Speech Transcription

> The new open-source automatic speech recognition model handles multilingual transcription and speaker identification out of the box.

Published by The Open Weights on Jan 21, 2026. Canonical: https://theopenweights.com/news/vibevoice-asr-umgc

## Key facts

- Company: Microsoft
- Model: VibeVoice ASR
- Version: 1.0
- Category: Speech → Text
- Modalities: Speech → Text
- License: Other (Open weights, commercial use allowed)
- Architecture: VibeVoiceForASRTraining
- Precision: BF16
- Weights size: 17.3 GB
- Languages: 50+ languages
- Significance: notable
- Published: 2026-01-21
- Last verified: 2026-06-17
- Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/microsoft/VibeVoice-ASR
- Canonical URL: https://theopenweights.com/news/vibevoice-asr-umgc

Microsoft has released VibeVoice-ASR, a new foundational model for automatic speech recognition. The system, now available on Hugging Face, is designed to convert spoken audio into written text across multiple languages.

Beyond simple transcription, VibeVoice's key capability is integrated speaker diarization—the ability to identify and label who is speaking and when. This feature is crucial for accurately transcribing conversations with multiple participants, such as meetings, interviews, or panel discussions, without requiring a separate post-processing step.

## Why It Matters

The release adds a notable new entry into the competitive open-source audio space, which includes popular models like OpenAI's Whisper. While Microsoft has not yet published detailed performance benchmarks, VibeVoice’s built-in diarization offers a more streamlined solution for developers who would otherwise need to combine separate models for transcription and speaker identification.

Prospective users should take note of the licensing. According to the [official model card](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/VibeVoice-ASR), VibeVoice-ASR is being released for research purposes only. This will limit its immediate use in commercial products but provides a valuable new tool for the academic community exploring advanced speech processing systems.

## Get the model

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/VibeVoice-ASR)

## Sources

- [microsoft/VibeVoice-ASR](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/VibeVoice-ASR) — Hugging Face, Jan 21, 2026

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Source: The Open Weights (https://theopenweights.com/). Aggregated and written by Claude, curated by humans. Cite as: "Microsoft Releases VibeVoice for Speech Transcription", The Open Weights, Jan 21, 2026, https://theopenweights.com/news/vibevoice-asr-umgc