MENASpeechBank is a new reference voice bank that provides about 18,000 high‑quality utterances from 124 speakers across multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties. The dataset is built through a controllable pipeline that creates persona profiles inspired by the World Values Survey, defines a taxonomy of roughly 5,000 conversational scenarios, matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, and generates around 417,000 role‑play conversations using an LLM. Synthetic speaker‑conditioned user‑turn audio is produced from reference recordings to maintain speaker diversity, and both synthetic and human‑recorded conversations are evaluated and analyzed for quality.
By Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Rabindra Nath Nandi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam
arXiv:2510.10774v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Persian remains substantially underrepresented in open speech-text resources, limiting progress in multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS), speech...
By Mohammad Javad Ranjbar Kalahroodi, Heshaam Faili, Azadeh Shakery
arXiv:2609.14542v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neyshekar is presented as an open Persian read-speech corpus designed for coverage of both formal and informal language, named entities, and longer utt...
By Ahmad Amirivojdan, Farzad Nadiri, Abolfazl Alizadeh, Shaghayegh Yaraghi
arXiv:2609.36920v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Comprehensive evaluations of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Iberian languages remain limited, and low-resource languages, biases, and efficienc...
By Fernando L\'opez, Pablo G\'omez, David Solans, Paulo Villegas, Jordi Luque
arXiv:2606. 19747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quran Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert Quranic recitation into text, enabling applications such as aided memorisation tools and Quranic search engines.
By Nabil Mosharraf Hossain (Greentech Apps Foundation, United Kingdom), Riasat Islam (Greentech Apps Foundation, United Kingdom, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom), Unaizah Obaidellah (University of Malaya, Malaysia)
arXiv:2606. 03504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present BaltiVoice, a 16.
By Muhammad Ali
We present BaltiVoice, a 16. 8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources.
arXiv:2608. 13580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jais 2 is a family of Arabic-centric large language models developed jointly by MBZUAI, Cerebras, and Inception, designed to advance Arabic-centric language modeling, with strong performance across the Arabic and culturally grounded benchmarks evaluated in this report.
By Mohamed Anwar, Abed Alhakim Freihat, George Ibrahim, Mostafa Awad, Abdelrahman Sadallah, Gurpreet Gosal, Gokulakrishnan Ramakrishnan, Sarath Chandran, Biswajit Mishra, Rituraj Joshi, Ahmed Frikha, Etienne Goffinet, Abhishek Maiti, Ali El Filali, Sarah AlBarri, Samujjwal Ghosh, Rahul Pal, Parvez Mullah, Awantika Shukla, Sajid siddiki, Samta Kamboj, Onkar Pandit, Sunil Kumar Sahu, AbdelRahman Elbadawy, Amr Mohamed, Ahmad Chamma, Evan Dufraisse, Abdelaziz Bounhar, Dani Bouch, Hadi Abdine, Guokan Shang, Fajri Koto, Yuxia Wang, Zhuohan Xie, Ali Mekky, Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad, Momina Ahsan, Omar El Herraoui, Daniil Orel, Hasan Iqbal, Kareem Elzeky, Mervat Abassy, Kareem Elozeiri, Saadeldine Eletter, Farah Atif, Nurdaulet Mukhituly, Haonan Li, Xudong Han, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Zainul Abedien Ahmed Quraishi, Neha Sengupta, Larry Murray, Avraham Sheinin, Joel Hestness, Natalia Vassilieva, Hector Xuguang Ren, Zhengzhong Liu, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Preslav Nakov
arXiv:2608.21950v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces unique challenges due to diglossia, extensive regional dialect variation, and limited speech resource...
By Ahmed Ashraf, Aisha Alansari, Fadel Al Abbas, Nada Almarwani, Samah Aloufi, Saad Ezzini, Maged S. Al-Shaibani, Doaa Dalaq, AbdelRahim A. Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Mohamed Mehdi Trigui, Dania Refai, Layan Refai, Mohamed Akrout, Mustafa Jarrar, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Alaa Dalaq, Darin El-Nakla, Samir Abdaljalil, Abdulrahman Al-Fakih, Nour El Imane Zeghib, Moussa Redah, Salmane Chafik, Mohamed El-Attar, Rima Grati, Sarah Kohail, Malak Alkhorasani, Khadijah Al Safwan, Ismail M. Mudhaffar, Ali Altam, Ahmed Al-Shaikh, Adnan Saeed, Hamzah Luqman
The paper introduces methods to improve speech recognition for multilingual video transcription using Whisper-based tools, targeting cross‑cultural understanding. It reports an average transcription error rate of 30% across seven languages, which can be lowered to 20% with modest fine‑tuning. The authors also release associated speech and metadata to aid community refinement of these techniques.
By Michael Picheny
NADI 2026 is the seventh edition of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification shared task series and the second focused on multidialectal Arabic speech processing. It includes five main tasks—Automatic Speech Recognition, Spoken Dialect Identification, Text-to-Speech, Spoken Language Translation, and Spoken Language Understanding—along with eight subtasks that test realistic scenarios such as low‑bandwidth, mixed dialects, code‑switching, out‑of‑domain, and zero‑shot settings. The event attracted 21 teams from at least 13 countries, with 48 test‑phase submissions and 14 system‑description papers, and the results highlight out‑of‑domain generalization as a major bottleneck while showcasing the strengths of Arabic‑specialized speech models, multimodal dialect identification, and ensemble methods.
By Peter Sullivan, Bashar Talafha, Ahmed Ashraf, Fethi Bougares, Haroun Elleuch, Chiyu Zhang, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Youssef Mohamed, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Est\`eve, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Hamzah Luqman, Nizar Habash, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
arXiv:2607. 23808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India.
By Deovrat Mehendale, Aditya Mehndiratta, Dhruv Rathi, Kaushal Bhogale, Mitesh M. Khapra