The paper evaluates a multilingual ASR model (MMS‑1B‑all) on a Garrusi Kurdish dataset using a common‑reference staged normalization approach. By normalizing both reference and hypothesis, the authors show that raw Arabic‑script hypotheses yield a 111.70 % WER, which drops to 97.85 % after folding into a reduced orthography, highlighting the impact of orthographic differences on error measurement. A Southern Kurdish fine‑tuned system performs worse, and residual errors are partly due to scoring‑pipeline limitations rather than recognition failures.
By Hiwa Asadpour
TRILOGUE is a new trilingual benchmark for spoken dialogue fact‑checking, covering English, Russian, and Kazakh. It includes almost 12,000 dialogues, 187,000 turns, and 390 hours of paired audio with ASR transcripts and word‑level timestamps, as well as nearly 5,000 human‑recorded Russian and Kazakh files. The dataset supports tasks such as claim check‑worthiness detection, evidence retrieval, and claim verification under various input conditions, and baseline experiments reveal challenges with ASR errors and cross‑lingual transfer, especially for Kazakh.
By Chaewan Chun, Meruyert Aristombayeva, Jiyoung Choi, Mahjabin Nahar, Delvin Ce Zhang, Dongwon Lee
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
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
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: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)
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: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.
By Samip Neupane, Sandesh Pokhrel, Sandesh Pyakurel, Basanta Joshi
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
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.
By Suman Paudel, Sarbin Sayami
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
arXiv:2607. 17164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for morphologically rich, low-resource languages such as Assamese is challenging due to insufficient annotated speech data.
By Ganapati Das, Dwipen Laskar, Hasin Afzal Ahmed, Sanjib Kr Kalita, Kshirod Sarmah, Hem Chandra Das, Manjula Kalita