Fact · Transcription
37.0percent word error rate
On the Fleurs benchmark, the Whisper large-v2 model had a word error rate of 37.0 percent for Kannada.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Model Croatian Hungarian Armenian Indonesian Icelandic Italian Japanese Javanese Georgian Kazakh Khmer Kannada Korean Luxembourgish ... Whisper large-v2 13.4 17.0 44.6 7.1 38.2 4.0 5.3 nan 105.0 37.7 99.7 37.0 14.3 88.0”
Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision (full text), Alec Radford et al., OpenAI (arXiv), 2022, Table 13 (Fleurs), column Kannada.
Open the original (DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2212.04356)- What it measures
- Fleurs is a read-speech benchmark in about 100 languages. The figure is for the largest Whisper model in the table, large-v2, from 2022.
- What it does not show
- Read sentences, not conversation. The 2022 table is older than the newer comparisons in our guide, so newer systems may differ.