Related papers: Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition Models f…

In recent years, neural models trained on large multilingual text and speech datasets have shown great potential for supporting low-resource languages. This study investigates the performances of two state-of-the-art Automatic Speech…

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…

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…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has reached impressive accuracy for high-resource languages, yet its utility in linguistic fieldwork remains limited. Recordings collected in fieldwork contexts present unique challenges, including…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance across diverse NLP tasks, and their integration with speech encoder is rapidly emerging as a dominant trend in the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) field. Previous works…

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…

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…

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 covered 16 African languages, we expand this to 1,226 through continued…

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 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…

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…

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…

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 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…

Whisper, the recently developed multilingual weakly supervised model, is reported to perform well on multiple speech recognition benchmarks in both monolingual and multilingual settings. However, it is not clear how Whisper would fare under…

Approaching Speech-to-Text and Automatic Speech Recognition problems in low-resource languages is notoriously challenging due to the scarcity of validated datasets and the diversity of dialects. Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese exemplify…

We present the first self-supervised multilingual speech model trained exclusively on African speech. The model learned from nearly 60 000 hours of unlabeled speech segments in 21 languages and dialects spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. On the…

Automatic speech recognition for low-resource languages remains fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of labeled data and computational resources required by state-of-the-art models. We present a systematic investigation into…

Masked speech modeling (MSM) methods such as wav2vec2 or w2v-BERT learn representations over speech frames which are randomly masked within an utterance. While these methods improve performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems,…