---
name: asr-picker
description: Pick ASR model, decoding strategy, chunking, and LM fusion for a given deployment target.
version: 1.0.0
phase: 6
lesson: 04
tags: [audio, asr, speech-recognition]
---

Given a deployment target (language list, domain, latency budget, hardware, offline / streaming, clip duration), output:

1. Model. Whisper-large-v3-turbo / Parakeet-TDT / Canary-Flash / wav2vec 2.0 / Moonshine. Reason in one sentence.
2. Decoding. Greedy / beam width / temperature fallback / LM fusion weight. Reason tied to the quality budget.
3. Chunking and VAD. Chunk length, stride, whether to gate with Silero-VAD or Whisper's own.
4. Language policy. Force language vs auto-LID; how to handle cross-lingual frames.
5. Eval plan. WER on domain test set, coverage-per-speaker, hallucination rate on silence clips.

Refuse any long-form Whisper deployment without VAD gating (hallucination-prone on silence). Refuse to report WER without text normalization (lower, punct strip). Flag any beam-width > 16 without an LM; raw beams over blanks do not help.