Related papers: Sagalee: an Open Source Automatic Speech Recogniti…

We present Ethio-ASR, a suite of multilingual CTC-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models jointly trained on five Ethiopian languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo, Sidaama, and Wolaytta. These languages belong to the Semitic, Cushitic,…

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…

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…

We present improvements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Somali, a currently extremely under-resourced language. This forms part of a continuing United Nations (UN) effort to employ ASR-based keyword spotting systems to support…

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…

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…

In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have significantly improved, especially in languages with a vast amount of transcribed speech data. However, ASR systems tend to perform poorly for low-resource languages with…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can play a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of spoken languages worldwide. In this paper, we build a set of ASR tools for Amharic, a language spoken by more than 50 million people primarily in…

We present the Thiomi Dataset, a large-scale multimodal corpus spanning ten African languages across four language families: Swahili, Kikuyu, Kamba, Kimeru, Luo, Maasai, Kipsigis, Somali (East Africa); Wolof (West Africa); and Fulani…

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…

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…

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,…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are designed to transcribe spoken language into written text and find utility in a variety of applications including voice assistants and transcription services. However, it has been observed that…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often need to be developed for extremely low-resource languages to serve end-uses such as audio content categorization and search. While universal phone recognition is natural to consider when no…

The performance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems fundamentally depends on high-quality training data. However, low-resource languages like Arabic suffer from severe data scarcity. Moreover, the absence of child-specific speech…

Bengali is one of the most spoken languages in the world with over 300 million speakers globally. Despite its popularity, research into the development of Bengali speech recognition systems is hindered due to the lack of diverse open-source…

Although many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been developed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), few studies have focused on dialect-specific implementations, particularly for low-resource Arabic…

This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South…

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of Urdu Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models. We analyze the performance of three ASR model families: Whisper, MMS, and Seamless-M4T using Word Error Rate (WER), along with a detailed…

We present a phoneme-level analysis of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for two low-resourced and phonologically complex East Caucasian languages, Archi and Rutul, based on curated and standardized speech-transcript resources totaling…