MS-ensemble-speech-recognition

Closed weights Microsoft 3.2B parameters September 2016

No estimate

No hardware requirements for this model

The weights for this model have not been published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any size. It is reachable only through its provider, and no graphics card changes that.

On record

Full specification

Everything on record for this model. Most of it describes how it was trained rather than how it runs — useful context for judging how much work went into it, and how it compares with models built at a different scale.

Origin

Who built this model, where, and when it was published.

Organisation
Microsoft
Organisation type
Industry
Country
United States of America
Published
12 September 2016
Authors
Wayne Xiong, J. Droppo, Xuedong Huang, F. Seide, M. Seltzer, A. Stolcke, Dong Yu, G. Zweig

What it does

The problem areas the model was built for. A model can carry several of each.

Domain
Speech
Task
Speech recognition (ASR)
Approach
Supervised

Size

How large the model is and how much data it was trained on. Parameters are the figure that decides whether it fits on a given graphics card.

Parameters
3.2B

Large ensemble CNNs: 85000000 + 38000000 + 65000000 = 188000000 = 188M LSTMs: 40 / 140 input - 6*512 layers - 9000 / 27000 output 4*(140+512)*512 + 5*4*(512+512)*512 + 4*(512+27000)*27000=2983117056 LM: 1000*1000 = 1000000 + Embedding Total: 1000000+2983117056+188000000=3172117056 (underestimate because it doesn't account for embeddings)

Training data
11,140,000,000 tokens

2000h of audio data + 85M words of text data

Availability

Whether you can obtain the model and run it on your own hardware, which is what decides if any of the graphics-card figures on this page apply.

Weights
Closed — provider access only
Model access
Unreleased

How it is classified

Labels the source dataset applies when tracking notable models, and how confident it is in the entry.

Why it is tracked
SOTA improvement

https://paperswithcode.com/sota/speech-recognition-on-switchboard-hub500

Record confidence
Likely

Sources

Where this record came from and when it was last checked.

Reference
The microsoft 2016 conversational speech recognition system
Last updated
28 November 2025

What the numbers mean

Background

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition was published by Microsoft, in the country recorded as United States of America, during September 2016. The publishing organisation is categorised as industry.

It works in the domain of Speech, and is recorded as performing the task of speech recognition (ASR).

Because the weights are not available, none of the hardware figures elsewhere on this site apply to it.

What went into building it

Training consumed a corpus of around 11,140,000,000 tokens of text.

Its inclusion criterion: sOTA improvement.

Answers

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition — common questions

01

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition— what is it used for?

It works in the domain of Speech, and is recorded as handling the task of speech recognition (ASR). These are the areas it was designed around; they describe intent rather than a hard boundary.

02

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition— what GPU do I need to run it?

None. This is a closed model — its weights were never published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any price. It is reachable only through its provider.

03

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition— is it open source?

No. Its weights have not been published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.

04

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition— how many parameters does it have?

It has a parameter count of 3.2B. Large ensemble CNNs: 85000000 + 38000000 + 65000000 = 188000000 = 188M LSTMs: 40 / 140 input - 6*512 layers - 9000 / 27000 output 4*(140+512)*512 + 5*4*(512+512)*512 + 4*(512+27000)*27000=2983117056 LM: 1000*1000 = 1000000 + Embedding Total: 1000000+2983117056+188000000=3172117056 (underestimate because it doesn't account for embeddings). That figure is the total, and it is what decides how much memory the model needs — roughly half a gigabyte per billion at the compression most people use.

05

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition— who created it?

It was published by Microsoft, based in United States of America, an organisation categorised as industry.

06

MS-ensemble-speech-recognition— when was it released?

It was published in September 2016. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 28 November 2025

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