What changed
Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open speech model that follows text commands and combines transcription, translation, and speaker recognition for up to 40 languages. The model has 30 billion parameters, but only 4 billion are active per step, allowing it to run on a single GPU. It ranks near the top of benchmarks for accuracy and speaker attribution. Nvidia is also releasing Granary v2, a dataset with 844,000 hours of audio, along with tools for efficiently adapting the model to specialized fields like medicine.
What this means in practice
Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe is designed to handle all of that in a single model, and it can answer questions about a recording's content as well. Nvidia says the model transcribes 40 languages, translates 31 of them to or from English, and identifies speakers in 13. It handles recordings up to an hour long. They can include up to eight speakers. Users control the model with simple instructions. Depending on the prompt, the same meeting recording can become a transcript with speaker labels, an English translation, or a summary of the decisions made. Users can also pass along technical terms like drug names as hints. The model is only supposed to use them if they actually appear in the recording.
Limitations and availability
The model is only supposed to use them if they actually appear in the recording. The base model has limits too. Features vary by language, and Nvidia says the audio question-answering feature was trained in English. The model is also built only for recorded audio. Nvidia says users should spot-check names, speaker changes, and answers. The model and dataset are on Hugging Face. There's also a demo you can try. For fine-tuning, Nvidia offers guides and an extension that lets an AI coding assistant run the training workflow.
