AI models tested for Arabic
Does it actually work for Saudi, Najdi, Hijazi or Gulf Arabic? Benchmarks rarely say. The community tests these models on real speech and text — and reports back.
Tarteel Whisper Quran ASR
Tarteel AI
Whisper-base fine-tuned for Quranic Arabic recitation, reporting 5.75% WER on its evaluation set. Narrow by design — it targets recitation rather than conversational Arabic — but it is the most-adopted open Arabic speech model outside the general Whisper checkpoints, and underpins Tarteel's memorisation app. A tiny variant is also published.
Cohere Transcribe Arabic
Cohere Labs
Arabic-specialised speech-to-text model (Jul 2026) built on Cohere's general transcribe checkpoint. One of the most-downloaded dedicated Arabic ASR repositories on Hugging Face, and unusually for an Arabic ASR release it carries a permissive licence. The repo is gated behind a contact-sharing agreement.
Whisper large-v3
OpenAI
State-of-the-art open speech recognition covering 99+ languages and the default open ASR baseline for Arabic products, though Arabic is one language among many rather than a focus and dialectal Arabic remains its weak point. Note the licence inconsistency: this model card states Apache 2.0 while the openai/whisper GitHub repo and the large-v3-turbo card state MIT.