Canto: A speech model built for the real world

Speech recognition models have become remarkably good at transcribing clean audio recorded under controlled conditions. But real dictation rarely happens under those conditions. Millions of people use Wispr Flow to message friends, write emails, code, and work through ideas at their desks, between meetings, during commutes, and in busy offices. They speak through laptop microphones, earbuds, and headsets, often with other voices, music, or traffic in the background.

Today, the Wispr Advanced Interfaces Lab is introducing Canto, our latest speech model for real-time dictation. On an evaluation of real-world dictations, Canto achieved the lowest word error rate among all the models we tested. We compared Canto with models from Google, OpenAI, AssemblyAI, and Deepgram.