Noctus(@noctus91):Can an STT model make sense of a 135 year old recording? I tested @MistralAI new Voxtral transcription model on a noisy French phonograph recording of Gustave Eiffel from 1891. It matched 100 of 107 words in INA’s published excerpts (6.5% WER), while transcribing 75 additional words omitted from the reference. It handled Eiffel’s dictation well but struggled with proper names and some guest dialogue. A fascinating test of modern speech recognition on audio from 1891.

Noctus

@noctus91

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Noctus@noctus91

2026.10.20 16:41

Can an STT model make sense of a 135 year old recording? I tested @MistralAI new Voxtral transcription model on a noisy French phonograph recording of Gustave Eiffel from 1891. It matched 100 of 107 words in INA’s published excerpts (6.5% WER), while transcribing 75 additional words omitted from the reference. It handled Eiffel’s dictation well but struggled with proper names and some guest dialogue. A fascinating test of modern speech recognition on audio from 1891.