EmbeddingGemma 2 fine-tune achieves SOTA Vietnamese ASR for US$78
Fine-tuning a small slice of an embedding model's audio encoder may be a cheaper route to dialect-scale speech models than full ASR training, since data and compute needs drop to hours instead of weeks. Developers serving underrepresented languages in Southeast Asia can adapt the recipe — partial encoder fine-tuning plus a CTC reader — for other regional languages and accents. Its 6.87% WER edges out paid APIs like Cohere Transcribe and ElevenLabs Scribe v2 on Vietnamese benchmarks.
