diff --git a/nemo_text_processing/text_normalization/normalize_with_audio.py b/nemo_text_processing/text_normalization/normalize_with_audio.py
index a6dacf049..f232c04df 100644
--- a/nemo_text_processing/text_normalization/normalize_with_audio.py
+++ b/nemo_text_processing/text_normalization/normalize_with_audio.py
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
 from time import perf_counter
 from typing import List, Optional, Tuple
 
-import jiwer
+import editdistance
 import pynini
 from nemo_text_processing.text_normalization.data_loader_utils import post_process_punct, pre_process
 from nemo_text_processing.text_normalization.normalize import Normalizer
@@ -406,7 +406,7 @@ def calculate_cer(normalized_texts: List[str], pred_text: str, remove_punct=Fals
             for punct in "!?:;,.-()*+-/<=>@^_":
                 text_clean = text_clean.replace(punct, " ").replace("  ", " ")
 
-        cer = jiwer.cer(pred_text, text_clean) * 100
+        cer = editdistance.eval(pred_text, text_clean) * 100.0 / len(pred_text)
         normalized_options.append((text, cer, i))
     return normalized_options
 
diff --git a/requirements/requirements.txt b/requirements/requirements.txt
index b3ed551f0..8c8de986e 100644
--- a/requirements/requirements.txt
+++ b/requirements/requirements.txt
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 cdifflib
+editdistance
 inflect
-jiwer>2.3.0
 joblib
 pandas
 pynini==2.1.5