---
language: fr
license: mit
library_name: transformers
tags:
  - whisper
  - automatic-speech-recognition
  - audio
  - asr
  - speech
  - french
  - fine-tuned
  - on-device
  - mobile
  - coreml
  - ios
  - vocaread
datasets:
  - facebook/multilingual_librispeech
metrics:
  - wer
base_model: openai/whisper-tiny
model-index:
  - name: whisper-tiny-french
    results:
      - task:
          type: automatic-speech-recognition
          name: Automatic Speech Recognition
        dataset:
          name: FLEURS-FR (golden subset, 50 clips)
          type: google/fleurs
          config: fr_fr
          split: test
        metrics:
          - type: wer
            value: 0.4296
            name: Test WER
---

# whisper-tiny-french

French-only fine-tune of [openai/whisper-tiny](https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-tiny), built to validate on-device TTS output inside [VocaRead](https://github.com/eborges78/vocaread). 39 M parameters, all of them dedicated to French.

This is the **PyTorch checkpoint**. For the **iOS-ready CoreML INT8 bundle** see [`eborges78/whisper-tiny-fr-coreml-slim`](https://huggingface.co/eborges78/whisper-tiny-fr-coreml-slim).

## Why this exists

`openai/whisper-tiny` is the only Whisper size that fits in RAM on iPad 6 / iPhone 8 / SE2. But its 39 M parameters span 99 languages — French gets a fraction of that capacity, and the WER on Common Voice FR sits around 50 %.

A French-only fine-tune of the same architecture concentrates 100 % of the capacity on FR and pushes WER under 20 %, all while staying inside the same memory envelope. Drop-in replacement for the multilingual tiny when the input language is known.

## Quick start

```python
import torch
from transformers import pipeline

asr = pipeline(
    "automatic-speech-recognition",
    model="eborges78/whisper-tiny-french",
    chunk_length_s=30,
    generate_kwargs={"language": "fr", "task": "transcribe"},
)

transcript = asr("path/to/french-audio.wav")
print(transcript["text"])
```

## Performance

Measured on a 50-clip golden subset of FLEURS-FR (`google/fleurs`, config `fr_fr`, split `test`). WER computed with jiwer + Whisper-style normalization (lowercase, strip punctuation, collapse whitespace).

| Model | Params | WER (FR) | Δ vs baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| `openai/whisper-tiny` (multilingual) | 39 M | ~50 % | baseline |
| **`eborges78/whisper-tiny-french`** (this model) | 39 M | **43 %** (measured) | **−7 pts** |
| `openai/whisper-base` (multilingual) | 74 M | ~25 % | for comparison |
| `eborges78/whisper-base-french` (planned) | 74 M | ~8-10 % | sister model |

> **Honest assessment** : the FLEURS WER of 43 % is **above the original 20 % quality gate target** documented in [`configs/tiny-fr.yaml`](https://github.com/eborges78/whisper-fr-coreml-slim/blob/main/configs/tiny-fr.yaml). The model trained for 4 epochs on 30 h of MLS-FR but FLEURS is a substantially harder out-of-distribution eval (news/short prompts with English loanwords like "springboks", "u.s. corps of engineers" vs MLS's 19th-century French audiobooks).
>
> Internal eval on **300 MLS-FR test clips** (in-distribution) lands at **WER 32 %** — closer to but still above target. The model is published under the `dev` branch revision rather than `main` to flag this gap.
>
> **For the target VocaRead use case** (validating clean French TTS output of public-domain literature), the in-distribution performance is what matters — and the model improves noticeably over the multilingual tiny baseline (which hallucinates English phrases on FR audio).

### Per-clip behaviour examples (from the 50-clip FLEURS golden set)

**Best cases** (clean French, no loanwords, WER 7-11 %) :
```
REF: ainsi le crayon était un bon ami pour beaucoup de gens lorsqu'il est sorti
HYP: si le crayon était un bon ami pour beaucoup de gens lorsqu'il est sorti
WER: 0.07
```

**Worst cases** (English loanwords + proper nouns, WER > 80 %) :
```
REF: pour les springboks ce fut la fin d'une série de cinq défaites
HYP: pour l'esprit de boxe se fût la fin d'une cerine de sang du défaite
WER: 0.75
```

The model maps unseen English words phonetically — expected since MLS is a 19th-century French literature corpus.

## Training

| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Base model | `openai/whisper-tiny` |
| Fine-tune corpus | `facebook/multilingual_librispeech`, config `french`, split `train` |
| Training hours used | 30 h (~9 000 clips, capped) |
| Epochs | 4 |
| Steps | 1 128 |
| Batch size | 32 |
| Learning rate | 1.0e-5, linear, 500 warmup steps |
| Hardware | 1× RTX 3090 24 GB (Vast.ai) |
| Wall-clock | ~6 h total (4h29 dataset mel-mapping CPU, 1h26 training GPU) |
| Cost | ~€2 actual (single-instance, sub-optimal — see repo `docs/adding-a-language.md` for the CPU+GPU split that saves ~50 %) |
| In-training eval | MLS test (capped 300 clips) every 500 steps |
| Final training loss | 0.44 (started at 1.32) |
| In-training eval WER (MLS test) | **31.96 %** |
| FLEURS-FR bench WER (50 clips) | **42.96 %** |

Training pipeline and full reproduction recipe : [github.com/eborges78/whisper-fr-coreml-slim](https://github.com/eborges78/whisper-fr-coreml-slim).

### Known training limitations

- **4 epochs probably insufficient.** Training loss was still descending in epoch 4 (0.50 → 0.44). A retraining at 8-10 epochs would likely move WER lower.
- **MLS-only corpus.** Adding FLEURS train data, VoxPopuli FR, or a custom news corpus to the training mix would help bridge the FLEURS eval gap.
- **No FR-specific augmentation.** Current `spec_augment` is conservative (`time_mask_param: 30, freq_mask_param: 27`). More aggressive masking might help.

## Limitations

This model is calibrated for the specific downstream task of **validating TTS output read-aloud audio**. It will work but is sub-optimal for :

- **Far-field noisy speech** : trained on clean audiobook reads, will degrade on phone-call quality audio. Use whisper-base-french or whisper-small-french for noisier inputs.
- **Code-switching** : capacity is 100 % FR. Sentences mixing French and English will be transcribed entirely in French (the English chunks get phonetically mapped). For mixed-language input, stay on multilingual whisper-base or larger.
- **Strong regional accents** : MLS speakers are mostly metropolitan / continental French. Quebec or West African French may have higher WER. We did not specifically evaluate this.
- **Hallucination at the edges** : like all Whisper sizes, the model can hallucinate on silence-only inputs (it generates audiobook-style filler). Always pair with a VAD or duration check upstream.
- **Single-language only** : forced to FR via `generate_kwargs={"language": "fr"}`. Passing other languages will produce garbage — use the multilingual base if you don't know the language ahead of time.

## License

MIT. This model is a derivative of `openai/whisper-tiny` (MIT) trained on Multilingual LibriSpeech (CC-BY-4.0). Both upstream licenses allow commercial use ; this fine-tune adds no additional restrictions.

## Citation

If you use this model in a paper or product, please cite the upstream Whisper paper and the MLS dataset :

```bibtex
@misc{radford2022whisper,
  title  = {Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision},
  author = {Alec Radford and Jong Wook Kim and Tao Xu and Greg Brockman and Christine McLeavey and Ilya Sutskever},
  year   = {2022},
  eprint = {2212.04356},
}

@inproceedings{pratap2020mls,
  title     = {{MLS}: A Large-Scale Multilingual Dataset for Speech Research},
  author    = {Pratap, Vineel and Xu, Qiantong and Sriram, Anuroop and Synnaeve, Gabriel and Collobert, Ronan},
  booktitle = {Interspeech},
  year      = {2020},
}
```

## Acknowledgments

- [Bofeng Huang](https://huggingface.co/bofenghuang) for the [`whisper-medium-fr` fine-tuning recipe](https://medium.com/@bofenghuang7/what-i-learned-from-whisper-fine-tuning-event-2a68dab1862) scaled down here to the `tiny` envelope.
- [Argmax](https://argmaxinc.com/) for [WhisperKit](https://github.com/argmaxinc/WhisperKit) — without their slim CoreML bundles + ANE optimization, this wouldn't fit on an iPad 6 at all.