AfriSwitch is a 61.36‑hour, human‑transcribed benchmark of in‑the‑wild code‑switched speech covering 16 African languages and varieties, annotated with switch‑level English span tags, per‑utterance Code‑Mixing Index (CMI), and switch‑point counts. The corpus reveals that code‑switching behaviour varies widely across languages, with no single metric fully capturing how code‑switched a language is. Benchmarking five open and commercial multilingual ASR systems in a zero‑shot setting shows high word error rates, with the best system averaging 35.93% WER and none dropping below 24% on any language, indicating that Africa‑targeted training rather than model scale or nominal language coverage best predicts performance.
By Gabrial Zencha Ashungafac, Busayo Awobade, Tobi Olatunji
arXiv:2606.06037v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet their safety alignment is still primarily evalu...
By Virginia Ceccatelli, Yejin Jeon, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
arXiv:2609.09554v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. L...
By Shivam Singh, Aditya Yadavalli, Catherine Arnett, Alex Warstadt
We introduce BuzzASR, a collection of language-specialized fine-tuned Whisper models adapted for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in 102 languages. Large end-to-end Transformer-based ASR models such...
The paper addresses the challenge of identifying code‑switched utterances in language identification systems. It revisits the MaskLID approach, highlighting its overreliance on word‑level language association scores, and reformulates its optimization as an Integer Linear Program to incorporate clear, interpretable constraints. These enhancements significantly improve performance across ten diverse languages on code‑switching benchmarks, with the authors releasing code and data for reproducibility.
By Joanna Rado{\l}a, Josep Maria Crego, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2. 0 self-supervised speech encoder.
The paper introduces Hybrid Search, a method that refines warm-initialized large language model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by exploiting interactions between ASR hidden states and the base LLM’s hidden states. By identifying tokens with high semantic dependence and selectively correcting them, the approach surpasses traditional global LLM‑correction techniques such as rescoring and late fusion. The study demonstrates that even after warm initialization, LLM‑based ASR models can further benefit from their base LLM during inference.
By Chan-Jan Hsu, Jaeyeon Kim, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe, Hung-yi Lee, Carlos Busso
arXiv:2606. 01016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While End-to-End (E2E) Speech-Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs) are rapidly evolving, their evaluation methodologies remain limited to the era of simple transcription.
By Sicheng Yang, Shulan Ruan, Shiwei Wu, Yu Liu, Lu Fan, Zhi Li, You He
The paper examines how Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tools, particularly Whisper, are being used in community-led heritage language preservation, focusing on Cantonese oral histories in New Zealand. It reports that the best Whisper configuration achieved a 12.10 % Word Error Rate (WER) but struggled with non‑English segments, yet it can produce a first‑pass transcription in only 1 % of the time required for manual transcription.
By Sidney Wong, Chelsea Wong She, Eda Tang, Tiana Marshall Wong, Debbie Sew Hoy, Chelsea Wong
arXiv:2607. 04814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale.
By Andrei Florian, Cynthia Jayne Amol, Hope Kerubo Ombaba, Xiaoyu Cui, Boniface Mwau, Biatus Maina Kamau, Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare, Christiane Fellbaum, Happy Buzaaba
arXiv:2608.28916v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated with word error rate (WER), yet many voice workflows depend on exact written values f...
By Tyler Baumgartner, Brandon Tai, Lisa Kaelin-Martin, Candice Fan, Luc Debaupte, Bill Wang, Yi Zhong
arXiv:2608. 19936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Public benchmarks are important measures of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model capabilities.
By Theo Lebryk, David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Jens Madsen, Panagiotis Tzirakis