This is the reference codebase for running the automatic speech recognition (ASR) models (Moonshine models) trained and released by Useful Sensors.
Following Model Cards for Model Reporting (Mitchell et al.), we're providing some information about the automatic speech recognition model. More information on how these models were trained and evaluated can be found in the paper. Note, lot of the text has been copied verbatim from the model card for the Whisper model developed by OpenAI, because both models serve identical purposes, and carry identical risks.
The Moonshine models are trained for the speech recognition task, capable of transcribing English speech audio into English text. Useful Sensors developed the models to support their business direction of developing real time speech transcription products based on low cost hardware. There are 2 models of different sizes and capabilities, summarized in the following table.
| Size | Parameters | English-only model | Multilingual model |
|---|---|---|---|
| tiny | 27 M | ✓ | |
| base | 61 M | ✓ |
October 2024
Sequence-to-sequence ASR (automatic speech recognition) and speech translation model
The primary intended users of these models are AI developers that want to deploy English speech recognition systems in platforms that are severely constrained in memory capacity and computational resources. We recognize that once models are released, it is impossible to restrict access to only “intended” uses or to draw reasonable guidelines around what is or is not safe use.
The models are primarily trained and evaluated on English ASR task. They may exhibit additional capabilities, particularly if fine-tuned on certain tasks like voice activity detection, speaker classification, or speaker diarization but have not been robustly evaluated in these areas. We strongly recommend that users perform robust evaluations of the models in a particular context and domain before deploying them.
In particular, we caution against using Moonshine models to transcribe recordings of individuals taken without their consent or purporting to use these models for any kind of subjective classification. We recommend against use in high-risk domains like decision-making contexts, where flaws in accuracy can lead to pronounced flaws in outcomes. The models are intended to transcribe English speech, use of the model for classification is not only not evaluated but also not appropriate, particularly to infer human attributes.
The models are trained on 200,000 hours of audio and the corresponding transcripts collected from the internet, as well as datasets openly available and accessible on HuggingFace. The open datasets used are listed in the the accompanying paper.
Our evaluations show that, the models exhibit greater accuracy on standard datasets over existing ASR systems of similar sizes.
However, like any machine learning model, the predictions may include texts that are not actually spoken in the audio input (i.e. hallucination). We hypothesize that this happens because, given their general knowledge of language, the models combine trying to predict the next word in audio with trying to transcribe the audio itself.
In addition, the sequence-to-sequence architecture of the model makes it prone to generating repetitive texts, which can be mitigated to some degree by beam search and temperature scheduling but not perfectly. It is likely that this behavior and hallucinations may be worse for short audio segments, or segments where parts of words are cut off at the beginning or the end of the segment.
We anticipate that Moonshine models’ transcription capabilities may be used for improving accessibility tools, especially for real-time transcription. The real value of beneficial applications built on top of Moonshine models suggests that the disparate performance of these models may have real economic implications.
There are also potential dual-use concerns that come with releasing Moonshine. While we hope the technology will be used primarily for beneficial purposes, making ASR technology more accessible could enable more actors to build capable surveillance technologies or scale up existing surveillance efforts, as the speed and accuracy allow for affordable automatic transcription and translation of large volumes of audio communication. Moreover, these models may have some capabilities to recognize specific individuals out of the box, which in turn presents safety concerns related both to dual use and disparate performance. In practice, we expect that the cost of transcription is not the limiting factor of scaling up surveillance projects.