GigaSpeech 3 is a new Arabic speech corpus comprising 39,000 hours and 10 million weakly transcribed segments across Algerian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Saudi, and Syrian dialects. It is built from 60 hours of manual transcription per dialect, using self‑supervised labeling models and noisy‑student refinement to produce high‑quality data. The corpus enables dialect‑specific and multi‑dialect speech recognition models that outperform existing third‑party systems, achieving a macro‑average word error rate of 23.86% for dialect‑specific models and 25.51% for a multi‑dialect model.
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...
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.
arXiv:2601. 12494v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Audio large language models (LLMs) enable unified speech understanding and generation, but adapting them to linguistically complex and dialect-rich settings such as Arabic-English remains challenging.
arXiv:2605.16364v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) voice assistants are commonly built as cascaded Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) to LLM systems, where recogni...
Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.
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...
arXiv:2608.01291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present ArabicDialectSafety, a human-curated Arabic safety dataset of 25,071 prompts covering six Arabic varieties: Modern Standard Arabic, Syri...
The paper introduces EZ-Ar-VC, an Arabic-focused voice conversion model designed for robust voice anonymization across dialects and code-switching. It evaluates existing zero-shot VC systems, finds they poorly preserve Arabic pronunciation, and then trains EZ-VC on diverse Arabic speech to achieve strong intelligibility, naturalness, and speaker dissimilarity. Subjective tests confirm its effectiveness even for underrepresented dialects and mixed-language contexts.
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.
The paper evaluates the robustness of DistilHuBERT for accent classification using speaker‑disjoint splits and cross‑corpus tests with L2‑ARCTIC and other English accent datasets. It finds a large performance gap between in‑corpus and external evaluations, indicating that file‑level tests overestimate accuracy. The study shows that balanced external‑data training performs best, while pseudo‑labeling with confidence filtering is insufficient under domain mismatch.
arXiv:2609.24410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-to-text engines are extremely needed nowadays for different applications, representing an essential enabler in human-robot interaction. Still, s...
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.