Related papers: AfriNames: Most ASR models "butcher" African Names

Recent strides in automatic speech recognition (ASR) have accelerated their application in the medical domain where their performance on accented medical named entities (NE) such as drug names, diagnoses, and lab results, is largely…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

Accents play a pivotal role in shaping human communication, enhancing our ability to convey and comprehend messages with clarity and cultural nuance. While there has been significant progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR),…

This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundational Whisper model struggles with Amharic due to limited…

Building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is a challenging task, especially for under-resourced languages that need to construct corpora nearly from scratch and lack sufficient training data. It has emerged that several African…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies have transformed human-computer interaction; however, low-resource languages in Africa remain significantly underrepresented in both research and practical applications. This study…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a crucial tool for linguists aiming to perform a variety of language documentation tasks. However, modern ASR systems use data-hungry transformer architectures, rendering them generally unusable for…

High-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) is essential for virtual assistants (VAs) to work well. However, ASR often performs poorly on VA requests containing named entities. In this work, we start from the observation that many ASR…

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…

ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent with more than +2000 languages. This systematic literature…

Recent work has shown that systems for speech translation (ST) -- similarly to automatic speech recognition (ASR) -- poorly handle person names. This shortcoming does not only lead to errors that can seriously distort the meaning of the…

Thanks to the rise of self-supervised learning, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems now achieve near-human performance on a wide variety of datasets. However, they still lack generalization capability and are not robust to domain…

The development of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource African languages remains challenging due to limited transcribed speech data. While recent advances in large multilingual models like OpenAI's Whisper offer…

Speech technology remains out of reach for most of the over 2300 languages in Africa. We present the first systematic assessment of large-scale synthetic voice corpora for African ASR. We apply a three-step process: LLM-driven text…

This paper reports on the semi-supervised development of acoustic and language models for under-resourced, code-switched speech in five South African languages. Two approaches are considered. The first constructs four separate bilingual…

Despite the growing advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, the development of robust models for underrepresented languages, such as Nepali, remains a challenge. This research focuses on making an exhaustive and…

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 collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing…

A crucial part of an accurate and reliable spoken language assessment system is the underlying ASR model. Recently, large-scale pre-trained ASR foundation models such as Whisper have been made available. As the output of these models is…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems exhibit the best performance on speech that is similar to that on which it was trained. As such, underrepresented varieties including regional dialects, minority-speakers, and low-resource…