Related papers: Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages

We introduce the Universal Speech Model (USM), a single large model that performs automatic speech recognition (ASR) across 100+ languages. This is achieved by pre-training the encoder of the model on a large unlabeled multilingual dataset…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has helped extend speech technologies to more languages by reducing the need for labeled data. However, models are still far from supporting the world's 7000+ languages. We propose XEUS, a Cross-lingual…

In this work, we take on the challenging task of building a single text-to-speech synthesis system that is capable of generating speech in over 7000 languages, many of which lack sufficient data for traditional TTS development. By…

Recent models such as XLS-R and Whisper have made multilingual speech technologies more accessible by pre-training on audio from around 100 spoken languages each. However, there are thousands of spoken languages worldwide, and adapting to…

Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…

We present Speech-MASSIVE, a multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) dataset comprising the speech counterpart for a portion of the MASSIVE textual corpus. Speech-MASSIVE covers 12 languages from different families and inherits…

Automatic speech recognition systems have undoubtedly advanced with the integration of multilingual and multitask models such as Whisper, which have shown a promising ability to understand and process speech across a wide range of…

We study training a single acoustic model for multiple languages with the aim of improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance on low-resource languages, and over-all simplifying deployment of ASR systems that support diverse…

Recent advancements in language modeling have led to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of various natural language processing tasks. Despite their success in text-based tasks, applying LLMs to the speech domain remains…

Collecting high-quality studio recordings of audio is challenging, which limits the language coverage of text-to-speech (TTS) systems. This paper proposes a framework for scaling a multilingual TTS model to 100+ languages using found data…

This paper introduces Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) dataset, a large multilingual corpus suitable for speech research. The dataset is derived from read audiobooks from LibriVox and consists of 8 languages, including about 44.5K hours of…

Whisper is a multitask and multilingual speech model covering 99 languages. It yields commendable automatic speech recognition (ASR) results in a subset of its covered languages, but the model still underperforms on a non-negligible number…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performs well for high-resource languages with abundant paired audio-transcript data, but its accuracy degrades sharply for most languages due to limited publicly available aligned data. To this end, we…

The 2023 Multilingual Speech Universal Performance Benchmark (ML-SUPERB) Challenge expands upon the acclaimed SUPERB framework, emphasizing self-supervised models in multilingual speech recognition and language identification. The challenge…

Speech inherently contains rich acoustic information that extends far beyond the textual language. In real-world spoken language understanding, effective interpretation often requires integrating semantic meaning (e.g., content),…

In this work, we explore multiple architectures and training procedures for developing a multi-speaker and multi-lingual neural TTS system with the goals of a) improving the quality when the available data in the target language is limited…

In this paper we share findings from our effort to build practical machine translation (MT) systems capable of translating across over one thousand languages. We describe results in three research domains: (i) Building clean, web-mined…

Multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have shown great promise in recent years because of the simplified model training and deployment process. Conventional methods either train a universal multilingual model without taking…

The goal of multilingual speech technology is to facilitate seamless communication between individuals speaking different languages, creating the experience as though everyone were a multilingual speaker. To create this experience, speech…

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to recognize and transcribe speech from multiple languages within a single system. Whisper, one of the most advanced ASR models, excels in this domain by handling 99 languages…