Spark-Audio 1.0 Technical Report

Abstract

This paper introduces Spark-Audio 1.0, a speech foundation model trained on domestically produced computing infrastructure. The model accepts text and speech inputs and generates text outputs. It supports multilingual (99 languages) and multi-dialect (202 dialects) speech recognition, speech translation, audio perception and understanding, and both text- and speech-based dialogue, marking a shift from merely ``hearing clearly'' to genuinely ``understanding'' speech. Architecturally, Spark-Audio 1.0 couples a 0.65B-parameter dense audio encoder with a 30B-A3B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model (LLM). The audio encoder is pretrained with representation-enhanced BEST-RQ and then refined through multi-task supervised training. The audio--LLM is trained through staged pretraining, followed by post-training that combines supervised fine-tuning with on-policy distillation. In total, the model is trained on 13 million hours of audio data together with large-scale text data. We evaluate Spark-Audio 1.0 on mainstream audio and text benchmarks, as well as on in-house test sets drawn from real-world application scenarios. Despite using substantially less audio training data than Qwen3.5-Omni-Flash, Spark-Audio 1.0 achieves comparable performance on most audio and text tasks, outperforms it in multilingual speech recognition, spoken dialogue, and real-world application scenarios, and approaches the performance of larger closed-source models. Nevertheless, there remains room for improvement in instruction following and complex audio reasoning. Finally, the successful training of Spark-Audio 1.0 on domestic hardware, including Huawei Ascend 910B and Hygon BW1000 chips, demonstrates the feasibility of a domestic technical pathway for building speech foundation models.