AI Weekly Malaysia

IBM's Granite team published three speech models: the new granite-speech-5.0-2b, plus updated granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc and granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus. The 2B model handles transcription in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, translates to and from English in those languages plus English-to-Italian and Mandarin, and was trained on 390,000 hours of public audio with synthetic data added for Japanese ASR, keyword biasing and translation. New controls include language-ID prompting, keyword lists of up to 2,000 terms, and improved long-form and noisy/distant-microphone performance, while the 4.1-2b-plus update targets speaker attribution and timestamps for multi-speaker recordings.

Why: Check the language list before you plan anything: there is no Bahasa Malaysia, Indonesian, Thai or Vietnamese here, so a Malaysian-facing transcription feature would need fine-tuning or a commercial API instead. If your audio is English or Japanese, the two concrete levers are the 2,000-term keyword biasing (useful for product names, acronyms and local brand terms) and the 470M turboctc variant for on-device or high-throughput work where a 2B model is too heavy. The post gives no benchmark numbers, licence terms or pricing, so pilot it on your own audio before committing rather than trusting the 'more accurate and faster' framing.