What Cohere builds
Cohere is a Canadian company in Toronto and it occupies an odd place in this reference: the only maker that names Persian item by item in a model language list, and the only maker that closes all three routes to that Persian separately. One with price, one with licence, one with contract.
- Persian named in two models
- Three different licences
- A Canadian company
Last checked: This is a reference page. It is re-checked against the vendor sources and updated when a new version ships. What changed
Model families
The Cohere model lines, from commercial Command to research Aya.
Versions
| Versions | Released | Status | Model families |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aya Expanse 32B | current | Aya | |
| Cohere Transcribe | current | Cohere Transcribe | |
| Cohere Transcribe Arabic | current | Cohere Transcribe | |
| Command A+ | current | Cohere Command | |
| Command A Reasoning | current | Cohere Command | |
| Command A Translate | current | Cohere Command | |
| Command A Vision | current | Cohere Command | |
| Command A | current | Cohere Command |
Persian is written here by name, and that is rare
In this reference the usual answer to does this model handle Persian is a guess. The maker gives a round number, a hundred languages say, and prints no list. Cohere did not do that in two places. Command A Translate is a dedicated machine translation model and it names its 23 languages one by one, with Persian the last name on that list. Aya Expanse 32B covers the same 23 and Persian is among them.
For a site that publishes in four languages, that list is more interesting than any benchmark: English, Arabic, Turkish and Persian, all four, inside one list of 23. The model was built for exactly the work we do every day.
Three licences, three closed doors
Now the second half. All three models that touch Persian sit under a different licence, and each one fails you for a different reason.
Command A Translate ships closed weights and Cohere prints no price for it. Its pricing page gives a per-million-token rate only for models it deprecated on 15 September 2025, plus Aya Expanse. For Command A, Command A+, Translate, Reasoning and Vision there is no number at all and you are sent to sales.
Aya Expanse 32B publishes weights, 32 billion parameters, and you can download it. But the licence is CC BY-NC 4.0 with an acceptable use addendum. NC means no commercial use. Translate a client site with it and charge for the work, and you are in breach. The same trap Voxtral TTS carries at Mistral, sitting here on a text model instead.
Cohere Transcribe is the only place the licence is open and commercial: Apache 2.0, two billion parameters, speech recognition. And its list of 14 languages has no Persian in it.
The contract writes Iran in, and that is different
Every other maker in this reference publishes a supported-countries list with Iran absent from it. Cohere did something else. Its commercial SaaS agreement defines a term, Restricted Location, and writes Iran into it alongside Belarus, China, North Korea, Russia and Syria, then says the customer will not access or use the Services from a Restricted Location.
We write this separately because the weight of the claim is different. A name missing from a list can be an oversight. A name written into a contract definition cannot. So we say nothing about the Cohere hosted service and describe no way around it.
One thing we did not expect: Cohere is Canadian, its office is in Toronto and its agreement runs under Ontario law, and it carries this list anyway. That shows how a sanctions list travels from one jurisdiction to another, and that a service being Canadian on its own changes nothing.
Where Cohere really is the answer: Arabic audio
This page is not only a list of closed doors. There is one thing here that exists nowhere else in this reference.
Cohere Transcribe Arabic is a dedicated finetune for Arabic audio, under Apache 2.0, with support for regional dialects and for switching between Arabic and English mid-sentence. No other maker in this catalogue publishes a speech recognition model built for Arabic. For a project with Arabic audio in it, this is the best answer in the reference and the licence lets you sell the result.
Two limits they state themselves and both matter: it gives no timestamps and it does not separate speakers. For subtitling, that means manual work.
What we cannot tell you
The price of any current-generation Cohere model. What the pricing page prints is the Model Vault rate, which is hourly rent on a dedicated instance: Embed 4 starts at $4.00 an hour and $2,500 a month, and Rerank 4 Pro at the large tier reaches $10.00 an hour and $6,500 a month. Those are not token prices and they compare with no other maker, so the price column for Cohere models in our list stays empty.
And a small contradiction in their own numbers: the Cohere research page says Aya Expanse covers 101 languages, while the API documentation for the same model says 23. We print the documentation figure, because that is where the language list is written out.
What it is good at
- The only maker in this reference with a dedicated translation model that names its 23 languages one by one, Persian among them
- The only maker in this reference that publishes a speech recognition model built for Arabic, and under Apache 2.0 at that
- It publishes the weights of its Aya research line with parameter counts, which many do not
- Its documentation carries a deprecation date for every retired model, which few makers bother with
Where it falls short
- It prints no per-million-token rate for any current-generation model. The only token rates on the pricing page belong to models deprecated on 15 September 2025.
- Its commercial SaaS agreement writes Iran by name into the Restricted Location definition, so we say nothing about the hosted service.
- The models whose weights are published are CC BY-NC, which forbids commercial use. Read that before you build a product on one.
- Cohere Transcribe, the one with a commercial licence, has no Persian, and it says itself that it does no automatic language detection so you must declare the language up front.
- The Arabic speech model gives no timestamps and does not separate speakers.
Our take
If you have Arabic audio, Cohere is the best answer in this reference and the licence lets you sell the result. For everything else it is a maker worth reading and not one to build on: its language list is the most precise here, and all three routes to it are shut.
Questions people actually ask
Does Cohere work from Iran
Cohere own commercial SaaS agreement writes Iran by name into its Restricted Location definition and says the customer will not access the Services from such a place. So we say nothing about the hosted service and describe no way around it. The Aya model weights are published separately, but their licence forbids commercial use.
Which Cohere model handles Persian
Two. Command A Translate, a dedicated translation model that names Persian in its list of 23 languages, and Aya Expanse 32B, which covers the same 23 and publishes its weights. The first has no price, the second has no commercial licence.
Is it good for Persian speech to text
No. Cohere Transcribe names 14 languages and Persian is not one of them. For Arabic it is the only dedicated model in this reference and it carries an Apache 2.0 licence.
Why is the price column empty for Cohere models in your list
Because Cohere publishes no token rate for any current-generation model. Empty means we could not read it, not that it is free.