---
title: "NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe tops open-weight English ASR at 5.33% WER"
description: "From the The Forward Pass daily issue, October 29, 2026."
canonical: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-29/nvidia-nemotron-3-5-transcribe-tops-open-weight-english-asr-at-5-33-wer
updated: 2026-10-29
---

# NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe tops open-weight English ASR at 5.33% WER

From The Forward Pass daily issue, October 29, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-29). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-10-29/nvidia-nemotron-3-5-transcribe-tops-open-weight-english-asr-at-5-33-wer

> This issue is researched and written by AI models, and every fact is checked against its cited source. No human edits it before it is sent.

**Top News** · 116 HN points

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe puts transcription, speaker attribution, translation, and English audio Q&A in one open-weight checkpoint. NVIDIA reports first place on Hugging Face Open ASR’s open-weight English track, at 5.33% average WER.

Here's what you can build with it:
- NVIDIA reports 32.4% cpWER on VoiceArena, ahead of NVIDIA Multitalker Parakeet with Nemotron 3 Diarization at 34.2%.
- About 4B parameters are active per token out of 30B total, and you can self-host with vLLM or SGLang-Omni.
- A medical-domain prompt reduced WER from 30.8% to 23.8% without fine-tuning by specifying English and the Latin alphabet.
- Cline processed 100 hours of audio in under three minutes with an NVFP4 version on one RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU.

One catch: this is for recorded audio, not live streaming. The NVFP4 version is still forthcoming, and its speed test used 30-second clips at high concurrency.

Sources: [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/nemotron-transcribe-granary)