Related papers: Fine-tuning Whisper for Pashto ASR: strategies and…

Pashto is spoken by approximately 60--80 million people but has no published benchmarks for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) on any shared public test set. This paper reports the first reproducible multi-model evaluation on…

This study evaluates the feasibility of lightweight Whisper models (Tiny, Base, Small) for Urdu speech recognition in low-resource settings. Despite Urdu being the 10th most spoken language globally with over 230 million speakers, its…

Despite the growing advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, the development of robust models for underrepresented languages, such as Nepali, remains a challenge. This research focuses on making an exhaustive and…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages remains a challenging task due to limited training data. This paper introduces a comprehensive study exploring the effectiveness of Whisper, a pre-trained ASR model, for Northern…

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…

Text-to-speech (TTS) evaluation for low-resource non-Latin-script languages can fail when it relies on a single ASR round-trip word error rate (WER). A system may produce no audio, speak a neighbouring language, preserve target script text…

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…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization in Bangla remain challenging due to long form recordings, diverse acoustic conditions, and significant speaker variability. This work addresses these two core tasks in Bangla spoken…

Large, openly licensed speech datasets are essential for building automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, yet many widely spoken languages remain underrepresented in public resources. Pashto, spoken by more than 60 million people, has…

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…

Fine-tuning multilingual ASR models like Whisper for low-resource languages often improves read speech but degrades spontaneous audio performance, a phenomenon we term studio-bias. To diagnose this mismatch, we introduce Vividh-ASR, a…

Developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource languages is hindered by the scarcity of transcribed corpora. This proof-of-concept study explores songs as an unconventional yet promising data source for Kazakh ASR.…

Foundation ASR models often support many languages, e.g. 100 languages in Whisper. However, there has been limited work on integrating an additional, typically low-resource, language, while maintaining performance on the original language…

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…

The developments in transformer encoder-decoder architectures have led to significant breakthroughs in machine translation, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and instruction-based chat machines, among other applications. The pre-trained…

Automatic speech recognition has recently seen a significant advancement with large foundational models such as Whisper. However, these models often struggle to perform well in low-resource languages, such as Indian languages. This paper…

Whisper, despite being trained on 680K hours of web-scaled audio data, faces difficulty in recognising rare words like domain-specific terms, with a solution being contextual biasing through prompting. To improve upon this method, in this…

Whisper and other large-scale automatic speech recognition models have made significant progress in performance. However, their performance on many low-resource languages, such as Kazakh, is not satisfactory. It is worth researching how to…

Although commercial Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems support Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), they struggle with dialectal speech. We investigate the effect of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper on five major Arabic dialects (Gulf,…

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…