We propose a novel approach to enable the use of large, single-speaker ASR models, such as Whisper, for target speaker ASR. The key claim of this method is that it is much easier to model relative differences among speakers by learning to condition on frame-level diarization outputs than to learn the space of all speaker embeddings. We find that adding even a single bias term per diarization output type before the first transformer block can transform single-speaker ASR models into target-speaker ASR models. Our approach also supports speaker-attributed ASR by sequentially generating transcripts for each speaker in a diarization output. This simplified method outperforms baseline speech separation and diarization cascade by 12.9 % absolute ORC-WER on the NOTSOFAR-1 dataset.
@article{arxiv.2409.09543,
title = {Target Speaker ASR with Whisper},
author = {Alexander Polok and Dominik Klement and Matthew Wiesner and Sanjeev Khudanpur and Jan Černocký and Lukáš Burget},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.09543},
year = {2025}
}