Fact · Languages and accents
140.3percent word error rate
On the FLEURS benchmark, Whisper large-v2 had a word error rate of 140.3 percent for Amharic, meaning more errors than words in the reference.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Whisper large-v2 36.7 140.3 16.0 106.2 23.4 45.4 14.6 104.1 15.7 7.3 14.7 13.3 33.0 13.8”
Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (full text), Alec Radford et al., OpenAI (arXiv), 2022, Appendix D.2.4, Table 13.
Open the original (DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2212.04356)- What it measures
- The FLEURS table lists word error rates for each language. The row here is for Whisper large-v2, the largest model in the 2022 paper, with Amharic in the second column.
- What it does not show
- A word error rate above 100 percent is possible because insertions count as errors. The number describes the paper's test, not every Amharic recording.