Model reference · open weights

wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-finnish

Audio Finnish-NLP Speech→text 1 build Open weights 1k dl/mo

wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-finnish is an open-weight audio or speech model from Finnish-NLP. wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2-finnish (BF16) weighs 1.3 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-finnish is an automatic speech recognition model for Finnish, developed by Finnish-NLP.
  • It is a fine-tuned version of the facebook/wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2 model, trained on 276.7 hours of transcribed Finnish speech data.
  • The model contains 300 million parameters and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Summary of the Finnish-NLP/wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2-finnish model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byFinnish-NLP
Released2022-05-21
VRAM1.3 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2-finnish (BF16)

1.3 GBweights, file size
1.6 GBruntime overhead
CardOne streamMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What Finnish-NLP says about wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-finnish

Read the model card

This acoustic model is a fine-tuned version of facebook/wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2 for Finnish ASR. The model has been fine-tuned with 276.7 hours of Finnish transcribed speech data. Wav2Vec2 was introduced in this paper and first released at this page.

This repository also includes Finnish KenLM language model used in the decoding phase with the acoustic model.

Model description

Wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2 is Facebook AI's pretrained model for uralic language family (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian) speech. It is pretrained on 42.5k hours of unlabeled Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian speech from VoxPopuli V2 dataset with the wav2vec 2.0 objective.

This model is fine-tuned version of the pretrained model for Finnish ASR.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use this model for Finnish ASR (speech-to-text) task.

How to use

Check the run-finnish-asr-models.ipynb notebook in this repository for an detailed example on how to use this model.

Limitations and bias

This model was fine-tuned with audio samples which maximum length was 20 seconds so this model most likely works the best for quite short audios of similar length. However, you can try this model with a lot longer audios too and see how it works. If you encounter out of memory errors with very long audio files you can use the audio chunking method introduced in this blog post.

A vast majority of the data used for fine-tuning was from the Finnish Parliament dataset so this model may not generalize so well to very different domains like common daily spoken Finnish with dialects etc. In addition, audios of the datasets tend to be adult male dominated so this model may not work as well for speeches of children and women, for example.

The Finnish KenLM language model used in the decoding phase has been trained with text data from the audio transcriptions and from a subset of Finnish Wikipedia. Thus, the decoder's language model may not generalize to very different language, for example to spoken daily language with dialects (because especially the Wikipedia contains mostly formal Finnish language). It may be beneficial to train your own KenLM language model for your domain language and use that in the decoding.

Training data

This model was fine-tuned with 276.7 hours of Finnish transcribed speech data from following datasets:

DatasetHours% of total hours
Common Voice 9.0 Finnish train + evaluation + other splits10.80 h3.90 %
Finnish parliament session 20.24 h0.09 %
VoxPopuli Finnish21.97 h7.94 %
CSS10 Finnish10.32 h3.73 %
Aalto Finnish Parliament ASR Corpus228.00 h82.40 %
Finnish Broadcast Corpus5.37 h1.94 %

Datasets were filtered to include maximum length of 20 seconds long audio samples.

Training procedure

This model was trained on a Tesla V100 GPU, sponsored by Hugging Face & OVHcloud.

Training script was provided by Hugging Face and it is available here. We only modified its data loading for our custom datasets.

For the KenLM language model training, we followed the blog post tutorial provided by Hugging Face. Training data for the 5-gram KenLM were text transcriptions of the audio training data and 100k random samples of cleaned Finnish Wikipedia (August 2021) dataset.

Training hyperparameters

The following hyperparameters were used during training:

  • learning_rate: 1e-04
  • train_batch_size: 32
  • eval_batch_size: 32
  • seed: 42
  • optimizer: 8-bit Adam with betas=(0.9,0.999) and epsilon=1e-08
  • lr_scheduler_type: linear
  • lr_scheduler_warmup_steps: 500
  • num_epochs: 10
  • mixed_precision_training: Native AMP

The pretrained facebook/wav2vec2-large-uralic-voxpopuli-v2 model was initialized with following hyperparameters:

  • attention_dropout: 0.094
  • hidden_dropout: 0.047
  • feat_proj_dropout: 0.04
  • mask_time_prob: 0.082
  • layerdrop: 0.041
  • activation_dropout: 0.055
  • ctc_loss_reduction: "mean"

Training results

Training LossEpochStepValidation LossWer
1.94210.175000.86330.8870
0.5720.3310000.16500.1829
0.51490.515000.14160.1711
0.48840.66

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

Benchmarks

Reported results

As published on the model card: the maker's own numbers, not measured by AxForge.

TaskDatasetMetricScore
Automatic Speech RecognitionCommon Voice 9Test WER4.130
Automatic Speech RecognitionCommon Voice 9Test CER0.920
Automatic Speech RecognitionFLEURS ASRTest WER12.440
Automatic Speech RecognitionFLEURS ASRTest CER5.770
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