wtf is nemo?

NVIDIA NeMo Speech is an open-source Python framework built for researchers and developers who want to create, customize, or deploy AI models that work with audio and speech. The three main areas it covers are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR, turning spoken words into text), Text-to-Speech (TTS, generating spoken audio from written text), and Speech LLMs (large language models combined with speech capabilities for more natural voice interaction). The framework is designed to make it easier to start from pre-trained model checkpoints, models that have already been trained on large amounts of data, and adapt them to your specific needs, rather than training from scratch. NVIDIA releases a collection of models alongside the framework on HuggingFace, including Parakeet (an English speech recognition model with offline and streaming options), Canary (a multilingual speech recognition and translation model supporting 25 European languages), and MagpieTTS (a text-to-speech model covering 9 languages). Nemotron VoiceChat is also mentioned as a full-duplex conversational voice system built on this foundation. The framework is written in Python and requires PyTorch (a widely used deep learning library) and an NVIDIA GPU if you intend to train models. GPU stands for graphics processing unit, specialized hardware that speeds up AI training. Install via pip with the command nemo-toolkit[all]. The repository notes that as of 2026, this codebase has focused specifically on audio, speech, and multimodal LLMs, with broader modality support available in earlier releases.