Related papers: Benchmarking Multilingual Speech Models on Pashto:…

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…

We present the Pashto Common Voice corpus -- the first large-scale, openly licensed speech resource for Pashto, a language with over 60 million native speakers largely absent from open speech technology. Through a community effort spanning…

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) has advanced in high-resource languages, but most of the world's 7,000+ languages remain unsupported, leaving thousands of long-tail languages behind. Expanding ASR coverage has been costly and limited by…

Preschool evaluation is crucial because it gives teachers and parents influential knowledge about children's growth and development. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the necessity of online assessment for preschool children. One of the…

The prevalence of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in spoken language applications has increased significantly in recent years. Notably, many African languages lack sufficient linguistic resources to support the robustness of…

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…

While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is typically benchmarked by word error rate (WER), real-world applications ultimately hinge on semantic fidelity. This mismatch is particularly problematic for dysarthric speech, where articulatory…

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…

Dialectal Arabic (DA) speech data vary widely in domain coverage, dialect labeling practices, and recording conditions, complicating cross-dataset comparison and model evaluation. To characterize this landscape, we conduct a computational…

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)…

Zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) systems have advanced for English, however, it still lags behind due to insufficient resources. We address this gap for Arabic, a language of more than 450 million native speakers, by first…

This work evaluated several cutting-edge large-scale foundation models based on self-supervision or weak supervision, including SeamlessM4T, SeamlessM4T v2, and Whisper-large-v3, on three code-switched corpora. We found that self-supervised…

Word error rate (WER) is a standard metric for the evaluation of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, WER fails to provide a fair evaluation of human perceived quality in presence of spelling variations, abbreviations, or…

Existing multilingual benchmarks include Irish among dozens of languages but apply no Irish-aware text normalisation, leaving reliable and reproducible ASR comparison impossible. We introduce BlasBench, an open evaluation harness that…

The digitization of agricultural advisory services in India requires robust Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems capable of accurately transcribing domain-specific terminology in multiple Indian languages. This paper presents a…

Bengali, spoken by over 300 million people, is a morphologically rich and lowresource language, posing challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR). This research presents an end-to-end framework for Bengali ASR, building on a…

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…

This study focuses on recognizing Bangladeshi dialects and converting diverse Bengali accents into standardized formal Bengali speech. Dialects, often referred to as regional languages, are distinctive variations of a language spoken in a…

Natural language processing of conversational speech requires the availability of high-quality transcripts. In this paper, we express our skepticism towards the recent reports of very low Word Error Rates (WERs) achieved by modern Automatic…