Related papers: Improving Children's Speech Recognition by Fine-tu…

A key desiderata for inclusive and accessible speech recognition technology is ensuring its robust performance to children's speech. Notably, this includes the rapidly advancing neural network based end-to-end speech recognition systems.…

Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…

To understand why self-supervised learning (SSL) models have empirically achieved strong performances on several speech-processing downstream tasks, numerous studies have focused on analyzing the encoded information of the SSL layer…

A child's spoken ability continues to change until their adult age. Until 7-8yrs, their speech sound development and language structure evolve rapidly. This dynamic shift in their spoken communication skills and data privacy make it…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often struggle with transcribing child speech due to the lack of large child speech datasets required to accurately train child-friendly ASR models. However, there are huge amounts of annotated…

Unsupervised speech representation learning has shown remarkable success at finding representations that correlate with phonetic structures and improve downstream speech recognition performance. However, most research has been focused on…

Current state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition systems are trained to work in specific `domains', defined based on factors like application, sampling rate and codec. When such recognizers are used in conditions that do not match the…

Enhancing speech quality is an indispensable yet difficult task as it is often complicated by a range of degradation factors. In addition to additive noise, reverberation, clipping, and speech attenuation can all adversely affect speech…

Speech distortions are a long-standing problem that degrades the performance of supervisely trained speech processing models. It is high time that we enhance the robustness of speech processing models to obtain good performance when…

We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…

Single-channel speech enhancement is utilized in various tasks to mitigate the effect of interfering signals. Conventionally, to ensure the speech enhancement performs optimally, the speech enhancement has needed to be tuned for each task.…

Children are one of the most under-represented groups in speech technologies, as well as one of the most vulnerable in terms of privacy. Despite this, anonymization techniques targeting this population have received little attention. In…

Speech technology systems struggle with many downstream tasks for child speech due to small training corpora and the difficulties that child speech pose. We apply a novel dataset, SpeechMaturity, to state-of-the-art transformer models to…

Although supervised deep learning has revolutionized speech and audio processing, it has necessitated the building of specialist models for individual tasks and application scenarios. It is likewise difficult to apply this to dialects and…

The accuracy of modern automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems, when trained exclusively on adult data, drops substantially when applied to children's speech. The scarcity of children's speech corpora hinders fine-tuning ASV systems…

Despite being trained on massive and diverse datasets, speech self-supervised encoders are generally used for downstream purposes as mere frozen feature extractors or model initializers before fine-tuning. The former severely limits the…

Children speech recognition is challenging mainly due to the inherent high variability in children's physical and articulatory characteristics and expressions. This variability manifests in both acoustic constructs and linguistic usage due…

Speech recognizers trained on close-talking speech do not generalize to distant speech and the word error rate degradation can be as large as 40% absolute. Most studies focus on tackling distant speech recognition as a separate problem,…

Acoustic modeling for child speech is challenging due to the high acoustic variability caused by physiological differences in the vocal tract. The dearth of publicly available datasets makes the task more challenging. In this work, we…

This paper introduces GigaSpeech, an evolving, multi-domain English speech recognition corpus with 10,000 hours of high quality labeled audio suitable for supervised training, and 40,000 hours of total audio suitable for semi-supervised and…