Canary ouputs English for Arabic Speech
@BenoitWang Can you try `ar-SA`? We may have just assigned Arabic language under a Saudi dialect tag for that round. Hi @tbartley94, just tried but still got English outputs. hmm, okay will look into it @BenoitWang It looks like you're using Riva client to run Canary-1b model. If so, you need to pass language code in the client side. For example, `riva_asr_client --language_code=ar-AR --audio_file=ar-AR_sample.wav`. Could you try with `--language_code` param?  Hi @myungjongk, thank you that works much better. However when I looked into its transcriptions, compared with parakeet-ctc-1.1b-concat (the 1st image), it still generates very often the English tokens (the 2nd image), which degrades both the WER and CER quite a lot. The 20 samples are from CommonVoice 18.0. Am I still missing something please?

<img width="645" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c753bae8-6338-4164-b3eb-dfd0de6fa9b2" />

<img width="645" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4950a925-07ba-48bd-9839-282ca13cf4d1" />

In fact we're running this [Arabic ASR leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/elmresearchcenter/open_universal_arabic_asr_leaderboard), and we find that it performs badly compared to the other models, but we do wish to include Canary if this get fixed, thanks for your help @tbartley94 @myungjongk . Another observation is that both Canary 1b and 0.6b-turbo hallucinate quite often on Arabic speech, generating repeated tokens, which significantly increases CER.

<img width="885" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/017e9162-8729-46a8-a647-4ea31595eb53" /> Ooh, this is a good catch. Thanks for catching this. 

@myungjongk This may be a deployment issue, I'll evaluate with the NeMo model on my end to see if there's something that didn't pop up in our evaluations.
**Describe the bug**

Hello, I am trying to infer [Canary 1b](https://catalog.ngc.nvidia.com/orgs/nvidia/teams/riva/models/canary-riva-1b) for Arabic ASR with Riva quick start 2.18.0. According to the description it has already supported Arabic, but it outputs English instead of Arabic tokens. 

Here's a partial extract of my config.sh
```
service_enabled_asr=true
service_enabled_nlp=false
service_enabled_tts=false
service_enabled_nmt=false

asr_language_code=("ar-AR")
asr_acoustic_model=("canary")
asr_acoustic_model_variant=("1b")
use_existing_rmirs=false
```

When I used the same config to infer Parakeet 1.1b_unified_ml_cs_concat and Parakeet 1.1b_unified_ml_cs_universal, they do output Arabic tokens, so I guess the issue is within the Canary model. 

Any idea please?