arXiv Machine Learning

Neural Speaker Diarization via Multilingual Training: Evaluation on Low-Resource Nepali-Hindi Speech

arXiv:2606. 26144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speaker diarization, the task of determining "who spoke when" in a multi-speaker recording, is a critical component in applications such as meeting transcription, accessibility tools, and multilingual information retrieval.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Closing the Quality Gap in Low-Resource Text-to-Speech: LoRA Fine-Tuning of VoxCPM2 for Khmer and Korean

The paper investigates how to close the quality gap in low‑resource text‑to‑speech for Khmer and Korean using the VoxCPM2 model. By training a single low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) adapter on a shared 25.5‑hour corpus, the authors improve Khmer’s mean opinion score from 3.85 to 4.23 with a rank‑64 adapter, while Korean shows no significant gain. The study highlights that adaptation benefits mainly when the base model is weak and that training loss does not always align with human ratings.

By Phannet Pov, Hyun Woo Park, Voneat Pen, Sovandara Chhoun, Wan-Sup Cho, Saksonita Khoeurn
arXiv AI
6d ago

Human-1 by Josh Talks: A Full-Duplex Conversational Modeling Framework in Hindi using Real-World Conversations

The paper introduces Human-1, the first open and reproducible full‑duplex spoken dialogue system for Hindi. It adapts the Moshi architecture with a custom Hindi tokenizer and trains on 26,000 hours of real spontaneous conversations from 14,695 speakers, enabling the model to learn natural turn‑taking, interruptions, overlaps, and backchannels. A two‑stage training process—large‑scale pre‑training followed by fine‑tuning on 1,000 hours—yields a system that, according to both automatic metrics and human judgments, generates natural and meaningful full‑duplex conversational behavior in Hindi.

By Bhaskar Singh, Manas Dhir, Shobhit Banga, Pranav Sharma
arXiv AI
Jun 26

SamaVaani: Auditing and Debiasing Multilingual Clinical ASR for Indian Languages

arXiv:2606. 26901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used to document clinical encounters, yet its reliability in multilingual and demographically diverse Indian healthcare context remains largely unknown.

By Subham Kumar, Prakrithi Shivaprakash, Abhishek Manoharan, Astut Kurariya, Diptadhi Mukherjee, Prabhat Chand, Pratima Murthy, Koustav Rudra, Lekhansh Shukla, Animesh Mukherjee
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

SpeakPay: Domain-Adaptive LoRA Fine-Tuning of Whisper for Low-Resource Nepali Financial Speech Recognition

SpeakPay is a voice‑first digital wallet designed to make mobile payment apps in Nepal accessible to visually impaired users. The paper introduces NepFinSpeech‑403, a 403‑utterance Nepali financial voice command dataset, and demonstrates that fine‑tuning Whisper large‑v2 with LoRA reduces the Word Error Rate from 129.95% to 42.58% and improves Devanagari numeral recognition from 0.0% to 73.9%. Domain adaptation also boosts the Transaction Success Rate from 1.67% to 33.33%, with as few as 100 domain‑specific utterances halving the zero‑shot WER.

By Biraj Subedi
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Fine-Tuning Whisper for Automatic Speech Recognition in Baniwa: A Preliminary Study

The study fine‑tunes the Whisper Small model for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in Baniwa, an indigenous Arawakan language. Using a 0.54‑hour corpus of 1,373 manually transcribed recordings, the fine‑tuned model achieved a Word Error Rate of 37.5% and a Character Error Rate of 7.45%. These results provide an initial baseline for Baniwa ASR and suggest that multilingual foundation models can be adapted to extremely low‑resource languages.

By Leonardo Duart, Tiago Fonseca, Thiago Chac\'on
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Building and Evaluating Fixed-Voice Thai TTS from Synthetic Speech

The paper presents a method for creating a compact fixed‑voice Thai text‑to‑speech system by training a student model on synthetic speech generated from a large voice‑cloning teacher. By using only a short 15‑second voice reference and carefully filtering synthetic data, the authors build an 82‑million‑parameter model, Wayu‑Paxa‑TTS‑Edge, that runs on device without reference audio. The system achieves strong performance—68.2 % challenge‑set keyword accuracy, 91.4 % pause precision, and low character error rates—while outperforming its teacher and approaching the quality of a larger Gemini 3.1 model.

By Kunat Pipatanakul, Potsawee Manakul, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Sittipong Sripaisarnmongkol, Pakorn Nathong, Phatrasek Jirabovonvisut