Related papers: Children's Speech Recognition through Discrete Tok…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems often struggle to accurately process children's speech due to its distinct and highly variable acoustic and linguistic characteristics. While recent advancements in self-supervised learning (SSL)…

Children's speech recognition is a vital, yet largely overlooked domain when building inclusive speech technologies. The major challenge impeding progress in this domain is the lack of adequate child speech corpora; however, recent advances…

State-of-the-art ASRs show suboptimal performance for child speech. The scarcity of child speech limits the development of child speech recognition (CSR). Therefore, we studied child-to-child voice conversion (VC) from existing child…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are used in the financial domain to enhance the caller experience by enabling natural language understanding and facilitating efficient and intuitive interactions. Increasing use of ASR systems…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems play a key role in many commercial products including voice assistants. Typically, they require large amounts of clean speech data for training which gives an undue advantage to large organizations…

Recordings gathered with child-worn devices promised to revolutionize both fundamental and applied speech sciences by allowing the effortless capture of children's naturalistic speech environment and language production. This promise hinges…

Despite advancements in ASR, child speech recognition remains challenging due to acoustic variability and limited annotated data. While fine-tuning adult ASR models on child speech is common, comparisons with flat-start training remain…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) based discrete speech representations are highly compact and domain adaptable. In this paper, SSL discrete speech features extracted from WavLM models are used as additional cross-utterance acoustic context…

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…

Speech synthesis might hold the key to low-resource speech recognition. Data augmentation techniques have become an essential part of modern speech recognition training. Yet, they are simple, naive, and rarely reflect real-world conditions.…

Voice assistive technologies have given rise to far-reaching privacy and security concerns. In this paper we investigate whether modular automatic speech recognition (ASR) can improve privacy in voice assistive systems by combining…

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes…

Recently, discrete tokens derived from self-supervised learning (SSL) models via k-means clustering have been actively studied as pseudo-text in speech language models and as efficient intermediate representations for various tasks.…

We explore an ASR-free method for isolated word reading assessment in low-resource settings. Our few-shot approach compares input child speech to a small set of adult-provided reference templates. Inputs and templates are encoded using…

Discrete speech representation learning has recently attracted increasing interest in both acoustic and semantic modeling. Existing approaches typically encode 16 kHz waveforms into discrete tokens at a rate of 25 or 50 tokens per second.…

This paper presents results on Speaker Recognition (SR) for children's speech, using the OGI Kids corpus and GMM-UBM and GMM-SVM SR systems. Regions of the spectrum containing important speaker information for children are identified by…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for young children are needed due to the importance of age-appropriate educational technology. Because of the lack of publicly available young child speech data, feature extraction strategies such…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn high-level speech representations has been a popular approach to building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in low-resource settings. However, the common assumption made in literature is that…

Machine Speech Chain, simulating the human perception-production loop, proves effective in jointly improving ASR and TTS. We propose TokenChain, a fully discrete speech chain coupling semantic-token ASR with a two-stage TTS: an…

Children's speech recognition remains challenging due to substantial acoustic and linguistic variability, limited labeled data, and significant differences from adult speech. Speech foundation models can address these challenges through…