AISHELL-1
ERNIE 5.0 0.31% leads since February 2026 Models transcribe Mandarin read speech. Scored by character error rate.
About 170 hours of speech.
- Released
- September 2017
- Kind
- Speech recognition and translation
- Level
- Everyday
- Scored
- Checked automatically
- Answers
- Short answer
- Tasks
- All public
- Last in a launch post
- October 2025, dropped for a newer version
- Last model added
- February 2026
In the authors’ words
An open-source Mandarin speech corpus called AISHELL-1 is released. It is by far the largest corpus which is suitable for conducting the speech recognition research and building speech recognition systems for Mandarin. The recording procedure, including audio capturing devices and environments are presented in details. The preparation of the related resources, including transcriptions and lexicon are described. The corpus is released with a Kaldi recipe. Experimental results implies that the quality of audio recordings and transcriptions are promising.
ERNIE 5.0 leads with 0.31% among models released by January 2026
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
The newest model with a score here came out in January 2026, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:
- Claude Fable 5.2
-
Gemini 4 Carbon - GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- and 16 more
- 1 ERNIE 5.0 0.31%
- 2 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct 0.60%
- 3
LongCat-Flash-Omni 0.63% - 4 MiMo-Audio-7B-Instruct 1.78%
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ERNIE 5.0 | 0.31% | Feb 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 2 | Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct | 0.60% | Apr 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 3 | LongCat-Flash-Omni | 0.63% | Oct 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 4 | MiMo-Audio-7B-Instruct | 1.78% | Sep 2025 | Lab model card |
2 models have held number one in labs’ own numbers since 2023
Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.
Source: Labs’ model cards
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Source: Labs’ model cards
Labs moved on to AISHELL-2
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 31, 2025 | LongCat-Flash-Omni | 0.63 | AISHELL-1 |
| Apr 25, 2025 | Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct | 0.6 | AISHELL-1 |
4 system cards report it, from 4 labs
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 4, 2026 | ERNIE 5.0 technical report | 0.31 | AISHELL-1, WER, lower is better (Table 7) | Capabilities |
| Oct 31, 2025 | LongCat-Flash-Omni technical report | 0.63 | AISHELL-1, CER, lower is better (Table 9) | Capabilities |
| Sep 18, 2025 | MiMo-Audio-7B-Instruct technical report | 1.78 | AISHELL WER, lower is better (Table 9) | Capabilities |
| Apr 25, 2025 | Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct technical report | 0.6 | AISHELL-1, WER, lower is better (Table 4) | Capabilities |
Versions
We switch the top row to each new version when it comes out. Open it for one row per version. An old version stays in play while people still test it, so whoever first takes it past 85% gets credit for closing it out.
Source: Labs’ model cards
More in Audio and video
- Video-MMMU In use 300 expert-level lecture videos with questions testing perception, comprehension and adaptation of knowledge. Accuracy.
Qwen 3.8 Max 88.7% - LVBench In use Hours-long video understanding with multiple-choice questions on reasoning, grounding and summarization. Gemini 4 Argon 91.7%
- MMVU In use 3,000 expert-annotated questions on videos across 27 disciplines. Multiple-choice and open-ended accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 82.4%
- MLVU In use Multi-task long video understanding (minutes to hours) with multiple-choice and generation tasks. Accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 90.8%
- FLEURS In use Models transcribe read speech in 102 languages built from FLoRes-101 sentences. Model cards usually report word error rate, so lower scores are better.
Phi-4-multimodal 4.00% - VoiceBench In use Spoken instructions with speaker, environment and content variation. Voice assistant responses scored by GPT judge or rules. Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus 93.1%