[ekagra-ranjan]

Followup to #35809
Turns on Cohere Transcribe model (official name) refered as CohereAsrForConditionalGeneration withing vLLM code. The official HF repo will be CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026.

The PR also adds the model to test_transcription_api_correctness.py but doesnt enable it yet. Its adds additional value to this test because this model touches all the recent changes that was done to the variable length encoder inputs. Earlier, vLLM only had padded length encoder inputs which was suited for whisper but not for Cohere-Transcribe.

That test calls a normalizer from the tokenizer but not all the models have a normalizer so we use the standard normalizer in the test for all the models in that test.

Cmd to run the model:
Install vLLM nightly and dependencies

uv pip install -U vllm --torch-backend=auto --extra-index-url https://wheels.vllm.ai/nightly
uv pip install vllm[audio]
uv pip install librosa

Start server

vllm serve CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026 --trust-remote-code

Send request

AUDIO_PATH=<your-audio-path>

curl -v -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/transcriptions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VLLM_API_KEY" \
-F "file=@$(realpath ${AUDIO_PATH})" \
-F "model=CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026"

[mergify]

Documentation preview: https://vllm--38120.org.readthedocs.build/en/38120/

[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request integrates the Cohere-Transcribe model by updating model paths, enabling its online availability, adding it to the supported models documentation, and incorporating it into transcription API correctness tests. The tests now utilize a standardized English text normalizer from Whisper for evaluation. A review comment suggests refactoring the model registry entry for CohereASRForConditionalGeneration to avoid duplication and improve maintainability.

[mergify]

Hi @ekagra-ranjan, the pre-commit checks have failed. Please run:

uv pip install pre-commit>=4.5.1
pre-commit install
pre-commit run --all-files

Then, commit the changes and push to your branch.

For future commits, pre-commit will run automatically on changed files before each commit.

Tip

Is mypy failing?

mypy is run differently in CI. If the failure is related to this check, please use the following command to run it locally:

# For mypy (substitute "3.10" with the failing version if needed)
pre-commit run --hook-stage manual mypy-3.10

[ekagra-ranjan]

Some CI is failing due to the model name issue. I'll fix it