The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.
By Saurabh Kumar, Diptiman Mohanta, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh
The paper introduces asymmetric classifier‑free guidance (CFG) for target‑speaker ASR using Whisper, where a speaker‑conditioned branch predicts the target transcript and a speaker‑unconditioned branch predicts serialized multi‑speaker transcripts. CFG modulates the influence of speaker conditioning during decoding via a single guidance scale, which is first set globally on development data and then refined per utterance by a lightweight encoder‑based predictor while keeping the recognition model fixed. The resulting system yields up to 21.8% relative WER reduction over a condition‑only baseline and 5.6% over standard conditional decoding under domain shifts.
By Yiwen Guan, Jacob Whitehill
The paper introduces ASCIL, a post‑ASR correction framework that re‑evaluates wake‑up intent by combining acoustic embeddings, linguistic cues, device context, and past misclassifications. ASCIL interprets both implicit (hesitation, disengagement, silence) and explicit (cancellation, repetition) signals as noisy indicators of misclassification, enabling online pattern updates without manual annotation. On a proprietary dataset of 3,667 interactions, ASCIL reduces errors by up to 54.27% relative on a session‑disjoint subset and 24.39% at a 0.90 threshold, while adding less than 60 ms of latency and improving intentional acceptance rates.
By Preeti Saraswat, Divya Neelagiri, Anil Yadav
The study examined whether providing full prompt-level context to a large multimodal model would improve speech transcription accuracy on a production oral‑history corpus. Using a preregistered within‑item paired ablation, the authors found that adding context did not produce a detectable change in side‑level word error rate (WER) for either gpt‑4o‑transcribe or gemini‑2.5‑flash. The results suggest that context alone may not be sufficient to enhance aggregate transcription accuracy, and that finer‑grained, sequence‑aligned metrics are needed to evaluate such mechanisms.
By Theodore O. Cochran, Stephanie Dodson, Keith Nore
arXiv:2607. 08371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic multi-speaker conversations are widely used to train conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but it remains unclear which timing properties make simulated data most useful.
By M\'at\'e Gedeon, P\'eter Mihajlik
The paper introduces a new benchmark of 13,044 spontaneous Nepali‑English code‑switched podcast utterances, totaling 15.45 h, and evaluates a two‑stage synthetic‑to‑real adaptation framework for ASR. Stage 1 uses supervised fine‑tuning on 0.95 h of synthetic speech, reducing Mixed Error Rate from 23.40 % to 21.52 % and switch‑point error rate from 35.89 % to 28.77 %. Stage 2 applies Group Relative Policy Optimization with script and transcription rewards, yielding modest but statistically significant further improvements, particularly in English script confusion and switch‑point accuracy. The study also shows that an auxiliary script reward term offers no benefit beyond MER‑only optimization in this setting, and that the synthetic SFT provides the main cross‑domain transfer to spontaneous human speech.
By Firoj Paudel
arXiv:2609.09889v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology is fundamental to customer service automation and large-scale transcription. However, even advanced ASR m...
By Yonghyun Jun, Jimin Lee, Hwan Chang, Dongho Shin, Seolah Kim, Hwanhee Lee
VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.
By Ramit Pahwa, Parivesh Priye, Apoorva Beedu
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:2609.39453v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech emotion recognition (SER) is the task of assigning emotion labels to utterances. Early systems relied on acoustic features, whereas recent app...
By Hezhao Zhang, Thomas Hain
The paper introduces LOGIC (Logit‑Space Integration for Contextual Biasing), a new framework that injects contextual entity information directly into the decoding layer of Speech Large Language Models, bypassing the limitations of prompt‑based methods. LOGIC operates with constant‑time complexity regardless of the size of the entity list, and experiments with the Phi‑4‑MM model across 11 multilingual locales show an average 9% relative reduction in Entity WER while adding only a 0.30% increase in False Alarm Rate.
By Peidong Wang, Jian Xue, Jinyu Li
SPAR-K is a scheduled periodic alternating early‑exit framework for interleaved spoken language models that reduces decoding depth for speech tokens while maintaining quality. It lets most speech positions exit at a fixed intermediate layer and inserts periodic full‑depth refresh steps to counter distribution shift. Experiments on Step‑Audio‑2‑mini and GLM‑4‑Voice show up to 11 % depth reduction with less than 0.82 % drop in question‑answering accuracy and negligible impact on MOS and WER.
By Hsiao-Ying Huang, Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-yi Lee