Abstract: A method for distilling one or more trained teacher automatic speech recognition (ASR) models into a multilingual student model includes receiving a plurality of teacher training examples and a plurality of student training examples. The method also includes training one or more teacher automatic speech recognition (ASR) models using the plurality of teacher training examples. Each teacher ASR model is configured to output a respective textual representation of a respective audio input. The method further includes generating a multi-lingual student ASR model by training the multi-lingual student ASR model using the plurality of student training examples and distilling the trained one or more teacher ASR models into the multilingual student ASR model using a tunable distillation loss weight. Each student ASR model is configured to receive an audio input and output a corresponding textual representation of the received audio input.