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
arXiv:2609.13151v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Leading multilingual speech recognition models like Whisper transcribe diverse, low-resource languages without language-specific training but are compu...
By Dylan Luke Holyoak
The paper introduces WaxalNet, a benchmark and adaptation study for spontaneous speech recognition across 19 African languages using the WAXAL corpus. It evaluates zero‑shot and fine‑tuned performance of several multilingual foundation models (Whisper, MMS, Omnilingual ASR, SeamlessM4T‑v2), showing that fine‑tuning can substantially reduce word error rates and that LLM decoders generally outperform CTC decoders when the encoder is shared. The authors also demonstrate that a single multilingual model can serve all languages with only a modest WER penalty and provide a native‑speaker audit of failure modes.
By Victor Tolulope Olufemi, Oreoluwa Babatunde, Ramsey Njema, Bolarinwa Gbotemi, Wanchi Lucia Yen, John Uzodinma, Sunday Ajayi, Oluwademilade Williams, Kausar Moshood, Innocent Elendu Anyaele, Akebert Arefaine, Candace Hunzwi, Wongel Dawit Daniel, Emmilly Namuganga, Cleophas Kadima, Athanase Bahizire, Onitsiky Ranaivoson, Emmanuel Aaron, Nicholaus Ladislaus, Idris Muhammed, Jonathan Enoch Simenya, Martin Koome, Matewos Tegete Endaylalu, Peter Ifeoluwa Adeyemo, Hondi Prisca Birindwa, Ukachi Agnes Eze-Mbey, Yacoba Oduro-Yeboah, Pericles Adjovi, Mikel K. Ngueajio, Toluwani Aremu, Prasenjit Mitra
The paper introduces a unified phoneme‑based TTS‑to‑ASR augmentation pipeline that uses a multilingual TTS model with language‑ID conditioning and incorporates grapheme‑to‑phoneme conversion, reference‑speech filtering, and candidate‑text selection. It proposes phoneme‑frequency‑guided selection (PFGS) to rank sentences based on phoneme frequencies from real ASR labels, and demonstrates that random augmentation and PFGS both improve ASR performance across Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese test sets, with PFGS yielding up to a 19.3% relative WER reduction. The study also shows that filtering reference speech can further lower WER by up to 0.59 points on certain datasets.
By Zhen Wang, TianRui Wu, RongQi Han, Hao Wu, Wei Liang
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:2609.15758v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Extending large-scale multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to low-resource languages remains challenging. Model performance is skewed...
By Thai Thi Thanh Thao Dang, Mengjie Qian, Kate Knill
arXiv:2603. 29042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Phone recognition (PR) is a key enabler of multilingual and low-resource speech processing tasks, yet robust performance remains elusive.
By Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, William Chen, Shinji Watanabe, David R. Mortensen
arXiv:2608. 04586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
By Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Chengpeng Fu, Yu Wang, Ming Liu
arXiv:2608. 04586v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in speech-to-text translation (S2TT).
By Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Chengpeng Fu, Yu Wang, Ming Liu
arXiv:2609.23825v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present a comprehensive benchmark of Federated Learning (FL) for multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), evaluating four Speech-LLM archite...
By Jordi Luque, Aleix Sant, Fernando L\'opez
The paper introduces a training‑free speech‑and‑text‑to‑pronunciation (ST2P) pipeline that combines lexical candidates from G2P tools with acoustic rescoring using frozen pretrained S2P models. By performing a left‑to‑right greedy search over whole‑sequence negative log‑likelihoods, the method achieves a dramatic reduction in character error rate on Japanese corpora, outperforming both baseline G2P/S2P approaches and commercial multimodal LLMs. The approach is also significantly faster—3–3.5× faster than beam search and twice as fast as direct decoding—while maintaining high accuracy across multiple languages.
By Hikaru Asano, Yotaro Kubo, So Kuroki
Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations.