FunAudio-ASR Revealed: The LLM-Powered Speech Recognition Breakthrough for Real-World Applications

1. Six questions engineers always ask first Question Quick answer 1. What is FunAudio-ASR? A production-first speech-to-text engine that couples a 0.7 B audio encoder with a 7 B LLM, then tunes the stack with reinforcement learning. 2. How is it better than Whisper? On real-world data collected after June-30 the average WER drops ≈ 20–30 % relative. It also streams at ≈ 200 ms and lets you inject domain hot-words on the fly. 3. Can I ship it today? Yes. The repo ships a Docker image, a Gradio demo, and a documented HTTP API. No license fee is mentioned …