arXiv AI

Model-Agnostic and Language-Agnostic Voice Pipeline Improvement for the Agriculture Domain

The paper introduces a modular, model‑agnostic pipeline to enhance automatic speech recognition for FarmerChat, an AI agricultural advisory assistant used by smallholder farmers in their native languages. The pipeline integrates gated audio enhancement, speaker diarization with target‑speaker selection, domain‑aware lexicon correction, and a quality gate, requiring fine‑tuning only at the diarization stage. Evaluations on Hindi, Telugu, and Odia recordings show significant reductions in word error rate—up to 42% on multi‑speaker cloud ASR models—demonstrating that targeted preprocessing and domain‑specific post‑processing can markedly improve transcription quality without altering the core ASR model.

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 Computation and Language
Sep 10

Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR Technical Report

The Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR Technical Report introduces a Mixture-of-Experts large language model-based automatic speech recognition system that addresses real‑world production challenges such as regional dialects, dynamic entities, hotwords, long‑range context, and disfluent speech. Built on the Qwen backbone and trained on tens of millions of hours of speech data, it supports transcription in 30 languages and 16 Chinese dialects, and offers industry‑domain entity recognition, hierarchical hotword customization, single‑pass polishing, and long‑audio contextual modeling. A streaming variant, Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR-Streaming, is also presented for low‑latency applications, with evaluations showing state‑of‑the‑art performance against leading commercial systems.

By Chuanmeng Bian, Daren Chen, Peixin Chen, Zhigao Chen, Zhiyun Fan, Zhifu Gao, Bo Gong, Qing Gu, Jiajun He, Yawei Hu, Yunjie Ji, Jingbei Li, Xiangang Li, Xu Li, Zengxi Li, Zheng Li, Chengdong Liang, Baiji Liu, Ying Liu, Bin Ma, Yiping Peng, Yuezhang Peng, Zhendong Peng, Yu Pu, Yang Shi, Xin Shu, Jian Tang, Biao Tian, Peiyao Wang, Tianzi Wang, Wen Wang, Wupeng Wang, Cheng Wen, Yuzhong Wu, Zijian Xia, Yunchong Xiao, Nan Yang, Jianwei Yu, Jixing Yu, Binbin Zhang, Lei Zhang, Sitong Zhao, Guangdong Zhou, Yuan Zhou, Jianheng Zhuo
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Inference-Time Target Speaker Unlearning in LLM-Based Automatic Speech Recognition

The paper introduces a new target‑speaker unlearning task for automatic speech recognition (TSU‑ASR) that allows certain speakers to opt out of transcription while still indicating their presence. A lightweight Enrollment‑Conditioned Gating (ECG) module is added to a frozen dual‑stream speech LLM, enabling dynamic unlearning of new opt‑out speakers during inference. Experiments on AMI and AliMeeting datasets show significant drops in transcription accuracy for opt‑out speakers while preserving performance for retained speakers.

By Bo Su, Yueru Yan, Thai Le
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Building and Evaluating a Synthetic Bengali Speech Resource for Telecom Customer Care

The paper introduces a synthetic Bengali speech dataset tailored for telecom customer‑care applications, comprising 10,000 audio‑text pairs (≈26.82 hours) with predefined train, validation, and test splits. The data were generated using OmniVoice voice‑cloning, and include both original and normalized transcripts for ASR/STT use. Automatic intelligibility evaluation with a fine‑tuned Whisper model shows an average WER of 2.54% and CER of 0.59%, indicating strong text‑audio consistency, while the authors note limitations of synthetic speech and STT‑based evaluation.

By Kawshik Kumar Paul, Md. Nafiul Alam Fuji
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Benchmarking and Domain Adaptation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Adolescent Health Communication in Ghanaian Languages

This study evaluates automatic speech recognition (ASR) for adolescent health communication in Twi, Dagbani, and Ewe by benchmarking five ASR systems on a Bible corpus and a domain-specific ASRH dataset, then performing supervised domain adaptation with a fine‑tuned Qwen3-ASR-0.6B model. Fine‑tuning significantly lowered word and character error rates, especially for Ewe, and the adapted model was deployed in the KasaHealth voice‑first application, which received high user approval and highlighted remaining domain gaps. The work demonstrates that in‑domain data, rather than model size or computational resources, is the primary limitation for effective ASR in these languages.

By Stephen E. Moore, Akwasi Asare, Mich-Seth Owusu, Paul Azunre, Joel Budu, Lawrence A. Adu-Gyamfi
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Scaling phoneme-based TTS augmentation for ASR: A unified pipeline and controlled study

The paper introduces a unified phoneme‑based TTS‑to‑ASR augmentation pipeline that uses a multilingual TTS model with language‑ID conditioning and incorporates grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion, reference‑speech filtering, and candidate‑text selection. It proposes phoneme‑frequency‑guided selection (PFGS) to rank sentences based on phoneme frequencies from real ASR labels, and demonstrates that random augmentation and PFGS both improve ASR performance across Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese test sets, with PFGS yielding up to a 19.3% relative WER reduction. The study also shows that filtering reference speech can further lower WER by up to 0.59 points on certain datasets.

By Zhen Wang, TianRui Wu, RongQi Han, Hao Wu, Wei Liang