Fermion Research · Compressed English ASR

Phonon-2

An open-weight English speech recognition model compressed from NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, with weights uploaded on 28 September. The encoder is ternary-quantised to about 2.1 bits per weight, shrinking the download from the teacher's 2.5GB to 164MB. Fermion reports a 5.21% average word error rate across seven Open ASR Leaderboard English test sets, down from Phonon-1's 6.56% at 415MB, and says it beats its own teacher on parliamentary and meeting speech. It transcribes an hour of audio in about 20 seconds on an M5 MacBook Air, all vendor-reported. CC-BY-4.0, with a PyPI CLI, Docker images and a macOS dictation app called Detta.