# Omnilingual ASR by Meta

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/omnilingual-asr/

6 people recommended Omnilingual ASR by Meta in Hacker News comments, 2 had mixed feelings and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 12 months, in 1 thread. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule.

6 of the 6 people who recommend it commented in one thread, “Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages”.

**Verdict:** Free, openly downloadable speech recognition for many languages, praised for rare-language coverage. Critics doubt accuracy outside major languages and say the demo misheard many words.

Summary written by Claude from 15 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Free, openly available, runs locally (2 comments in the sample): "This seems like a massive improvement for openly available local ASR." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880961)) "Freely downloadable and usable by anyone for almost anything." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45881750))
- Seen as a major advance (1 comment in the sample): "First, let me say that this is impressive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884104))

## What people warn about

- Weak accuracy outside major languages (2 comments in the sample): "it wins by supporting something rare well but never had good ASR accuracy even for Swedish etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884089)) "I highly doubt this model is anywhere near as good as it is on EU languages for most of them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45885331))
- Misrecognizes many words (2 comments in the sample): "reduces the ability of the model to actually transcribe what was said" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884826)) "the hf demo misrecognized about half of the words" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45881946))

## Other speech recognition models people recommend

- [OpenAI Whisper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper/): 122 recommend, 24 mixed, 44 criticize
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/parakeet/): 115 recommend, 17 mixed, 16 criticize
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-transcribe-2/): 47 recommend, 15 mixed, 24 criticize
- [whisper.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper-cpp/): 25 recommend, 6 mixed, 1 criticize

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Omnilingual ASR by Meta", https://hackerapproved.com/p/omnilingual-asr/ (6 recommend, 2 mixed, 5 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.