Fermion drops Phonon-2, a 164MB speech model that beats giants
Fermion Research just open-sourced Phonon-2, a lightweight English speech recognition model under 164MB. It transcribes an hour of audio in roughly 20 seconds on an M5 MacBook Air while scoring a 5.21% average word error rate. It proves high-accuracy ASR no longer needs multi-gigabyte models or cloud dependencies.