IBM's ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech
ported to transcribe.cpp. An audio-LLM: a Conformer encoder with block-local
Shaw attention, a BLIP-2 Q-Former projector, and the Granite-4.0-1b-base LLM
as an autoregressive decoder.
Offline multilingual speech-to-text covering English plus French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. The model takes a 16 kHz mono WAV and produces a transcript.
Translation pairs: English ↔ French, English ↔ German, English ↔ Spanish,
English ↔ Portuguese, English ↔ Japanese, plus English-to-Italian and
English-to-Mandarin. Always via English — there is no direct fr↔de, fr↔es,
etc. Pass the target language as a BCP-47 code via --translate --target-language <code>; the source language is inferred from the audio.
See IBM's model card for training data, intended use, and upstream evaluation methodology.
Licensed Apache-2.0. Ported from upstream commit
bd87ab8,
pinned 2026-05-17.
| Quantization | Download | Size | WER (LibriSpeech test-clean) |
|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 | granite-4.0-1b-speech-BF16.gguf | 4.63 GB | 1.42% |
| F16 | granite-4.0-1b-speech-F16.gguf | 4.63 GB | 1.42% |
| Q8_0 | granite-4.0-1b-speech-Q8_0.gguf | 2.56 GB | 1.44% |
| Q6_K | granite-4.0-1b-speech-Q6_K.gguf | 2.02 GB | 1.41% |
| Q5_K_M | granite-4.0-1b-speech-Q5_K_M.gguf | 1.83 GB | 1.42% |
| Q4_K_M | granite-4.0-1b-speech-Q4_K_M.gguf | 1.60 GB | 1.48% |
WER measured on the full LibriSpeech test-clean split (2620 utterances) with
greedy decoding. The BF16 reference baseline (transformers, re-run locally
with the model-card prompt USER: <|audio|>can you transcribe the speech into a written format?\n ASSISTANT:) is 1.42%, matching IBM's published
Open ASR Leaderboard number exactly. Text normalizer: Whisper
EnglishTextNormalizer, the same normalizer Open ASR Leaderboard uses.
cmake -B build
cmake --build build
build/bin/transcribe-cli \
-m models/granite-4.0-1b-speech/granite-4.0-1b-speech-Q8_0.gguf \
samples/jfk.wavIf your audio is not already 16 kHz mono WAV, convert it first:
ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -ar 16000 -ac 1 output.wavTranslation (granite uses one chat template, parameterized by target language):
build/bin/transcribe-cli \
-m models/granite-4.0-1b-speech/granite-4.0-1b-speech-Q8_0.gguf \
--translate --target-language de \
samples/jfk.wavCells are wall-clock latency, with speedup over realtime in parentheses.
Mean over 3 iterations after 1 warmup.
Metal
| Sample | Q4_K_M | Q8_0 |
|---|---|---|
| jfk (11.0s) | 254 ms (43×) | 284 ms (39×) |
| dots (35.3s) | 928 ms (38×) | 1.05 s (34×) |
CPU
| Sample | Q4_K_M | Q8_0 |
|---|---|---|
| jfk (11.0s) | 1.48 s (7.4×) | 1.80 s (6.1×) |
| dots (35.3s) | 5.15 s (6.9×) | 5.96 s (5.9×) |
macOS 26.4, transcribe.cpp de05c43.
Mean over 5 iterations after 2 warmups. Q8_0.
| Backend | Sample | Q8_0 |
|---|---|---|
| Metal | jfk (11.0s) | 959 ms (11×) |
| CPU | jfk (11.0s) | 2.44 s (5×) |
macOS 26.1, transcribe.cpp 275332d.
Mean over 3 iterations after 1 warmup.
Vulkan (RADV)
| Sample | Q4_K_M | Q8_0 |
|---|---|---|
| jfk (11.0s) | 3.47 s (3.2×) | 3.71 s (3.0×) |
| dots (35.3s) | 11.37 s (3.1×) | 12.30 s (2.9×) |
CPU
| Sample | Q4_K_M | Q8_0 |
|---|---|---|
| jfk (11.0s) | 5.21 s (2.1×) | 6.72 s (1.6×) |
| dots (35.3s) | 18.08 s (1.9×) | 24.21 s (1.5×) |
Linux 6.18 (Fedora 43), transcribe.cpp dbe5814.
| Capability | Status |
|---|---|
| Transcribe (English) | Yes |
| Transcribe (fr/de/es/pt/ja) | Yes |
| Translate (en↔ASR, en→it/zh) | Yes (--translate --target-language <bcp47>) |
| Word-level timestamps | No (use the -plus variant) |
| Speaker diarization | No (upstream supports via prompt; not exposed in v1 of transcribe.cpp) |
Tensor-level parity with the transformers reference on samples/jfk.wav.
Per-tensor max_abs / mean_abs budgets in
tests/tolerances/granite.json.
Drift is dominated by BF16 reduction-order noise in the 40-layer LLM stack
plus a localized band at the last Shaw block-local attention window
boundary in enc.block.15.out. No structural deltas vs the reference.
uv run --project scripts/envs/granite \
scripts/convert-granite.py ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speech \
--repo-id ibm-granite/granite-4.0-1b-speechfor PRESET in F16 Q8_0 Q6_K Q5_K_M Q4_K_M; do
build/bin/transcribe-quantize \
models/granite-4.0-1b-speech/granite-4.0-1b-speech-BF16.gguf \
models/granite-4.0-1b-speech/granite-4.0-1b-speech-${PRESET}.gguf \
--quant ${PRESET}
doneuv run scripts/validate.py all --family granite --variant granite-4.0-1b-speechuv run scripts/wer/run.py \
--model models/granite-4.0-1b-speech/granite-4.0-1b-speech-BF16.gguf \
--manifest samples/wer/test-clean.manifest.jsonl \
--out reports/wer/granite-4.0-1b-speech-BF16.test-clean.jsonl
uv run scripts/wer/score.py reports/wer/granite-4.0-1b-speech-BF16.test-clean.jsonl