Ear

Name the language from thirty seconds of audio.

On-device spoken language identification across 99 languages.

SDKs, install and examples: https://github.com/Desert-Ant-Labs/desert-ant-core/blob/main/docs/models/ear.md


Platforms	iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS, Android, Linux, Windows, Browser, Node
Languages	99
Weights	v0.1.0

Install

Swift (requirements)

.package(url: "https://github.com/Desert-Ant-Labs/desert-ant-core.git", from: "3.1.0")

Then add the Ear product to your target.

Kotlin (requirements)

implementation("ai.desertant:ear:3.1.0")

JavaScript (requirements)

npm i @desert-ant-labs/ear @litertjs/core   # browser
npm i @desert-ant-labs/ear                  # Node, prebuilt native core

Try it

Ear is on the site, with the SDK examples and the use cases: https://desertant.com/models/ear/

Files

File	What it is	Size
`ear.mlmodelc/`	Core ML, compiled, for the Apple Neural Engine (iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS)	13MB
`ear.tflite`	LiteRT, for Android, Linux, Windows, the browser, and Node	22MB
`ear_meta.json`	The audio front end and the windowing the SDKs follow
`languages.json`	The 99 language codes, in output order
`mel_filters.f32`	The 80 mel filters for the front end

The SDKs fetch the file for their platform on first use and cache it, or load it from a directory you ship with the app.

Inputs and outputs

Give Ear a file, or already-decoded samples at any rate; the SDK resamples to 16kHz mono. It listens to three 30-second windows rather than the whole recording, which takes about 250ms, and returns:

language: the code of the top candidate ("pt")
confidence: the probability of that candidate, averaged over the windows
candidates: every language with its probability, ranked
isReliable: false when the top two candidates are too close to separate, and false for Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, which the model confuses with each other confidently rather than uncertainly

Branch on isReliable. The threshold behind it was set by sweeping it against 162 recordings: of the answers above it, 98.5% route to the right recognizer, on files in a language the primary recognizer supports 100% do, and 86% of files clear it. The flag is decided once, in the model, so every SDK reads the same answer.

What it hears

A recording handed to a transcriber is not speech end to end, so Ear does not listen to it end to end either. It ranks candidate windows by how much their loudness varies at syllable rate: speech rises and falls three to six times a second and has gaps between words, music sustains, silence does not vary at all. The three most speech-like windows are the ones it reads.

That choice matters more than it sounds. Picking windows by position finds the language 4% of the time on a five-minute recording with speech in a tenth of it. Picking the loudest windows finds it half the time on a file with a music intro, because an intro is mixed hotter than the voice after it.

Accuracy

Measured end to end through the SDK, on real uploads:

	exact	confident	of those, right
Ordinary recordings	12/12	12/12	12/12
The same, rebuilt as podcasts	9/10	8/10	8/8

No confident answer was wrong in either set. The podcast miss is a German episode read as English under its jingle, and it was reported unsure.

Limits

Speech mixed under louder music is read correctly about 60% of the time. No choice of windows changes that; the model cannot read it.
Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are not distinguished reliably. isReliable is false for all three rather than reporting one confidently.
Recordings shorter than 30 seconds get a single window, so there is nothing to average and the answer is less certain than its number suggests.
A multilingual recording is reported as whichever language the chosen windows contain, not as a mixture.
Ear names the language; it does not transcribe. A language outside the 99 is reported as the nearest one it knows.

Languages

99, listed in languages.json in output order. Nordic languages carry the caveat above.

Built on

The weights derive from openai/whisper-tiny (MIT): the parameters this task does not use are removed, the subgraph that predicts a language is kept, and the result is compressed for on-device execution. The front end (80 log-mel bins, 400-point FFT, 160-sample hop, 30-second windows) runs on the host because it cannot run in float16; the SDKs implement it from ear_meta.json.

License

Desert Ant Labs Source-Available License. Free for most apps, and a commercial license is required at scale. Full terms are at the link. Licensing: licensing@desertant.com.

See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Citation

@software{ear_2026,
  title  = {Ear: On-device spoken language identification across 99 languages},
  author = {Desert Ant Labs},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/desert-ant-labs/ear},
}

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