arXiv AI

Comparative Analysis of Multilingual Pre-trained Models for Nepali Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2608. 12327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual pretrained models nominally support Nepali, yet no controlled benchmark has compared them under a single fine-tuning protocol.

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 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 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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

BranchShine-CR: Compact Multilingual IPA Transcription with Self-Conditioned CTC and Consistency Regularization

BranchShine-CR is a 25‑million‑parameter model that transcribes multilingual speech into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It uses log‑mel features, a rotary‑position E‑Branchformer encoder, intermediate self‑conditioned CTC, and consistency regularization across augmented views. On 16,646 shared IPApack++ test utterances it achieves a 4.47 % IPA character error rate, a 22.3 % relative improvement over ZIPA‑CTC‑NS and outperforms a similarly sized NeMo Conformer baseline across all 41 language labels.

By Nikhil Navas, Sergio Chevtchenko, Talisson Damiao, Saeed Afshar