Japanese Voice Recognition

Japanese Voice Recognition

Turns Japanese speech into text with a wav2vec2 model whose name points to hiragana output. For people who want to try Japanese speech recognition in a browser.

Made by Detomo on Hugging Face. These notes are Mindket's, written from its Space page and README; the app's own files and license are on Hugging Face.

About

What it is: This Space is a Japanese speech recognition demo from Detomo. It names one model, a wav2vec2 large XLSR checkpoint from vumichien, whose name points to hiragana output. The README holds only the standard Space settings text, so the demo itself is described by its files and model name.

Who it suits: It suits people who want to see Japanese speech turned into text, and learners or developers who want a small example to build from.

Industry | Who uses it | How they use it | Example
Education | Japanese learners | Check how spoken Japanese is written out | Speak a sentence and read the text that comes back
Research | Speech researchers | Try a Japanese recognition model | Run a sample clip and review the result
Development | Developers | Test a model before building an app around it | Run a clip from the samples folder
Media | Editors | Draft a transcript from Japanese audio | Get a rough text to correct by hand

You can skip it if you need a language other than Japanese or a recognizer with published accuracy figures.

Where to use it:

• A web browser, on the Space's page at Hugging Face
• Your own computer, on Windows, macOS or Linux

Use case | Who | What they get back
Transcribe a clip | Learners and researchers | Japanese text from speech
Try the samples | Newcomers | A quick look at output from the sample files
Test a model | Developers | A feel for how the hiragana model behaves

How to set it up:

• Nothing to install if you use the Space online
• Python, if you run a copy on your own computer
• The Python packages in requirements.txt
• The system packages in packages.txt, which Hugging Face installs with apt-get

1. Open the Space's page on Hugging Face to use it online.
2. To run a copy, install huggingface_hub and download the Space into a folder.
3. Move into that folder and install the pinned Gradio version, then the listed packages.
4. Start the app with Python.

pip install -U huggingface_hub
hf download Detomo/voice-japanese --repo-type space --local-dir voice-japanese
cd voice-japanese
pip install gradio==3.8
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

How to use it: Open the Space and give it Japanese speech. The README gives no steps, so follow the page's own controls. The repository has a samples folder to try. On your own copy, start the app with this command and open the local page Gradio prints.

python app.py

Example: Open the Space online and run it on a clip from the samples folder. You get back Japanese text, which the model name suggests is written in hiragana.

For newcomers and experts: If you are new, try a sample clip first and compare the text with what you hear. Hiragana is one of the Japanese writing systems, so the result may read differently from usual written Japanese.

If you know the field, the Space wraps a single wav2vec2 large XLSR model fine-tuned for Japanese hiragana in an older Gradio 3.8 app. The README gives no training data, error rates or limits, so test on your own audio before relying on it.

You give the app Japanese audio
The wav2vec2 XLSR model reads the sound
The app returns text in hiragana

Good to know:

• License: apache-2
• Cost to run: none named. The online Space runs on Hugging Face.
• Data it reaches: the audio you give it, and the model it names on Hugging Face.

On Hugging Face, 13 November 2026

• Likes: 4
• Built with: gradio
• License: apache-2.0

Links

• Space: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Detomo/voice-japanese
• Files: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Detomo/voice-japanese/tree/main

Try it

Open the Space in your browser, or copy it to your own Hugging Face account from its page. Nothing in this kit runs by itself.