granite-4.0-1b-speech

**Model Summary:** Granite-4.0-1b-speech is a compact and efficient speech-language model, specifically designed for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and bidirectional automatic speech translation (AST). The model was trained on a collection of public corpora comprising of diverse datasets for ASR and AST as well as synthetic datasets tailored to support Japanese ASR, keyword-biased ASR and speech translation. Granite-4.0-1b-speech was trained by modality aligning granite-4.0-1b-base to speech on publicly available open source corpora containing audio inputs and text targets. Compared to granite-speech-3.3-2b and granite-speech-3.3-8b, this model has the following additional capabilities and improvements: * Supports multilingual speech inputs in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, * Provides higher transcription accuracy for English ASR and faster inference through better encoder training and speculative decoding, * Has half the number of parameters of granite-speech-3.3-2b for running on resource-constrained devices, * Adds keyword list biasing capability for enhanced name and acronym recognition We evaluated granite-4.0-1b-speech alongside other speech-language models in the less than 8b parameter range as well as dedicated ASR and AST systems on standard benchmarks. The evaluation spanned multiple public benchmarks, with particular emphasis on English ASR tasks while also including multilingual ASR and AST for X-En and En-X translations.