wenet-e2e/wenet

WeNet is an infrastructure-grade project that has become a de-facto standard for developers building production-ready ASR systems, particularly in the Chinese and English markets. Its defensibility (8) is rooted in its 'deployment gravity'—it doesn't just provide model code, but the entire C++ runtime, ONNX/TensorRT export pipelines, and streaming protocols required for real-world applications. With over 5,000 stars and 1,100+ forks, it has massive community momentum. While Frontier labs like OpenAI (Whisper) or Google (USM) produce higher-accuracy foundation models, they often lack the low-latency streaming infrastructure and 'on-premise' flexibility that WeNet provides. WeNet's 'Unified' (U2/U2++) architecture, which trains one model for both streaming and non-streaming use, was a significant practical innovation. The high market consolidation risk reflects the trend toward a few dominant ASR architectures, but WeNet is likely to remain the primary open-source framework for those who cannot rely on cloud APIs due to privacy, latency, or cost constraints.