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Offline AI in your language · updated 2026-10-16

Can offline AI handle Urdu?
اردو in speech, text and translation: script choice, Roman Urdu and what the sources report.

Short answer. Yes, with a script decision first. Urdu is one of the better-covered Indian languages in Whisper: its paper counts 104 hours of Urdu training audio and reports 22.6% word error rate on read FLEURS sentences (large-v2). On natural speech in the IndicVoices paper, a Whisper model scored 29.7%, Meta’s MMS 43.6% and AI4Bharat’s IndicASR 14.4%. Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic script, yet Meta’s MMS lists Urdu speech recognition in Arabic, Devanagari and Latin scripts. IndicTrans2 scored 61.6 chrF++ from English to Urdu on conversational sentences. ANVE has not tested Urdu yet. Coverage and figures are as of October 2026.

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What open models cover in Urdu

TaskModelsWhat the source says
Speech to text: WhisperWhisper large-v2, large-v3The Whisper paper counts 104 hours of Urdu speech with Urdu transcripts, second only to Tamil among Indian languages, and 1,990 hours paired with English text. Large-v2 scored 22.6% word error rate on FLEURS and 24.2% on Common Voice 9.
Speech to text: Indian-language modelsIndicConformer, IndicWhisper, Meta MMSIndicConformer lists Urdu (MIT licence). IndicWhisper averages 19.4% on Urdu test sets, 19.2% on FLEURS. IndicVoices, natural speech: IndicASR 14.4%, MMS 43.6%, Whisper 29.7%. MMS lists Urdu in three scripts; its checkpoint is CC-BY-NC.
Chat, summaries, draftingQwen3, Gemma, SarvamQwen3’s launch post lists Urdu. The Llama 3.3 and 4 cards list no Urdu, and the gpt-oss card and MILU test none, so no figure is available here. Sarvam 30B and 105B list Urdu in their card metadata, and Sarvam’s 22-language benchmark includes it in native and romanised script. Gemma’s cards say over 140 languages without a list.
TranslationIndicTrans2, NLLB-200IndicTrans2 paper (2023), conversational set (IN22-Conv), chrF++: English to Urdu 61.6, Urdu to English 65.5; NLLB 1.2B distilled 55.9 and 61.5. On web and Wikipedia sentences (IN22-Gen): 68.2 and 73.0, IndicTrans2’s highest English-to-Indian-language score in that table.
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Perso-Arabic script, Roman Urdu and the Census

Urdu (اردو) is written in Perso-Arabic script, which the IndicTrans2 README groups with Kashmiri and Sindhi. The 2011 Census counted 5,07,72,631 people with Urdu as their mother tongue, 4.19% of India and the seventh largest group. Uttar Pradesh had 1,08,20,232, Bihar 87,70,002, Maharashtra 75,40,324, Andhra Pradesh as in 2011, which included today’s Telangana, 75,05,623, and Karnataka 66,18,324. Urdu is one of only two scheduled languages whose speaker count fell between 2001 and 2011, by 1.48%; Konkani fell 9.34%.

Hindi and Urdu are separate entries in every list used here, with separate test sets, and a Hindi model is not a drop-in Urdu model. The IndicVoices paper reports Whisper at 34.0% on Hindi and 29.7% on Urdu, and its own IndicASR at 15.0% and 14.4%.

Meta’s MMS lists Urdu speech recognition in Arabic, Devanagari and Latin scripts, so an office can ask for Urdu speech written in Urdu script, in Devanagari for Hindi readers, or in Roman letters. The Aksharantar paper says romanised input is widespread across Indian languages, but no source reports accuracy for Roman Urdu chat.

For English meetings, the Svarah paper measured Whisper large at 6.2% word error rate on speakers whose mother tongue is Urdu.

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What to test before you rely on it

  • Decide the script first: Urdu script, Devanagari or Roman letters. Then check that the transcript stays in it from the first minute to the last.
  • Check names, honorifics and place names against your own documents, and rupee amounts and dates said aloud.
  • Paste Urdu lines containing English names or numbers into your document or export format and check that they display in the right order.
  • Record spontaneous speech, not read sentences, and compare Whisper with an Indian-language model on the same ten minutes.
  • Translate a notice in both directions and ask an Urdu reader to mark errors. NLLB-200’s card says its translations cannot be used as certified translations.
04

Where ANVE stands

ANVE’s meeting-minutes maker handles Hindi, English and Hinglish today. Urdu has not been tested on ANVE yet, so there is no ANVE result to report and nothing here promises support.

Because ANVE does not update itself over the internet, the models you test are the models you keep until an update is installed. Today ANVEAI installs updates on site; signed offline USB updates are not on ANVE yet. See the security page.

A demo call is free. If Urdu decides your purchase, ask for your own recordings to be tried before you commit, in the script you want the minutes written in.

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Questions people ask

Can Whisper transcribe Urdu?
Yes: Urdu is in Whisper’s list, and large-v2 scored 22.6% word error rate on read FLEURS sentences with 104 hours of Urdu training audio. A Whisper model scored 29.7% on natural Urdu speech in the IndicVoices paper, so test on real meetings.
Which script will an Urdu transcript use?
That depends on the model. Meta’s MMS lists Urdu speech recognition in Arabic, Devanagari and Latin scripts. Choose the script you need and test that the model returns it every time.
Is Roman Urdu supported?
Meta’s MMS lists a Latin-script option for Urdu speech recognition. None of the sources checked reports accuracy for Roman Urdu text or chat, so test your own messages.
Can offline AI translate Urdu documents?
IndicTrans2 scored 61.6 chrF++ from English to Urdu and 65.5 from Urdu to English on conversational sentences, against 55.9 and 61.5 for NLLB 1.2B distilled. Scores measure overlap with a reference, so have an Urdu reader check anything official.
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What is not real yet

No sealed ANVE unit exists; every image of the appliance on this site is a labelled render. The software runs today on a development machine. No customers yet, no certifications, no delivery date, and the final price is not announced.

Reservations are ₹999 in India or US$12 elsewhere, refundable in full until you confirm an order in writing (terms). Offices that cannot use cloud AI can apply to be one of ten design partners.

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Sources