Related papers: AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representatio…

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 advancement of speech technologies has been remarkable, yet its integration with African languages remains limited due to the scarcity of African speech corpora. To address this issue, we present AfroDigits, a minimalist,…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) foundation models have emerged as powerful, domain-agnostic, general-purpose feature extractors applicable to a wide range of tasks. Such models pre-trained on human speech have demonstrated high…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT. However, developing robust ASR models for young children's speech…

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) 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…

We summarize the results of a host of efforts using giant automatic speech recognition (ASR) models pre-trained using large, diverse unlabeled datasets containing approximately a million hours of audio. We find that the combination of…

In the FAME! project, we aim to develop an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for Frisian-Dutch code-switching (CS) speech extracted from the archives of a local broadcaster with the ultimate goal of building a spoken document…

We investigate the performance of self-supervised pretraining frameworks on pathological speech datasets used for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Modern end-to-end models require thousands of hours of data to train well, but only a…

Large-scale multilingual evaluations, such as MEGA, often include only a handful of African languages due to the scarcity of high-quality evaluation data and the limited discoverability of existing African datasets. This lack of…

Recent improvements in multilingual ASR have not been equally distributed across languages and language varieties. To advance state-of-the-art (SOTA) ASR models, we present the Interspeech 2025 ML-SUPERB 2.0 Challenge. We construct a new…

Source separation can improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) under multi-party meeting scenarios by extracting single-speaker signals from overlapped speech. Despite the success of self-supervised learning models in single-channel…

Large scale machine learning (ML) systems such as the Alexa automatic speech recognition (ASR) system continue to improve with increasing amounts of manually transcribed training data. Instead of scaling manual transcription to impractical…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) speech models, which can serve as powerful upstream models to extract meaningful speech representations, have achieved unprecedented success in speech representation learning. However, their effectiveness on…

Few-shot keyword spotting aims to detect previously unseen keywords with very limited labeled samples. A pre-training and adaptation paradigm is typically adopted for this task. While effective in clean conditions, most existing approaches…

This paper presents XLS-R, a large-scale model for cross-lingual speech representation learning based on wav2vec 2.0. We train models with up to 2B parameters on nearly half a million hours of publicly available speech audio in 128…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods which learn representations of data without explicit supervision have gained popularity in speech-processing tasks, particularly for single-talker applications. However, these models often have…

This paper presents Conformer-1, an end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model trained on an extensive dataset of 570k hours of speech audio data, 91% of which was acquired from publicly available sources. To achieve this, we…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is crucial for human-machine interaction in diverse applications like conversational agents, industrial robotics, call center automation, and automated subtitling. However, developing high-performance ASR…

The development of high-performing, robust, and reliable speech technologies depends on large, high-quality datasets. However, African languages -- including our focus, Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba -- remain under-represented due to insufficient…