arXiv AI

BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language

arXiv:2606. 03504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present BaltiVoice, a 16.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Fine-Tuning Whisper for Automatic Speech Recognition in Baniwa: A Preliminary Study

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 Computation and Language
Aug 24

Building and Evaluating a Synthetic Bengali Speech Resource for Telecom Customer Care

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Vimarsha: Faithful ASR Evaluation for Indian Languages with Demographic Diversity, In-the-Wild Audio and Spelling Variations

arXiv:2609.24199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation benchmarks for Indian language automatic speech recognition (ASR) suffer from two systematic biases: optimistic scores from clean, controlle...

By Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Srija Anand, Sadakopa Ramakrishnan Thothathiri, Tahir Javed, Sshubam Verma, Mitesh M. Khapra
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Subtitle-Aligned Fine-Tuning of Whisper for Swiss German ASR: Benchmark Contamination, Convention Mismatch, and an Honest Baseline at 25.6% WER (13.8% cWER)

arXiv:2606. 07608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic study of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper large-v3 for Swiss German ASR, using 1,367 hours of broadcast speech paired with Standard German subtitles as weak supervision.

By Felix Akeret
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

SpeakPay: Domain-Adaptive LoRA Fine-Tuning of Whisper for Low-Resource Nepali Financial Speech Recognition

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 Computation and Language
3d ago

TutlAit v1: a crowdsourced Moroccan Tamazight speech dataset with Arabic transcriptions and regional accent labels

The TutlAit v1 dataset is a crowdsourced corpus of Moroccan Tamazight speech paired with Modern Standard Arabic transcriptions and explicit regional accent labels. It contains 13,384 audio files (≈20.9 hours) collected via a web application, with volunteers contributing through text‑to‑audio and audio‑to‑text workflows, and includes additional segments from freely available media. The dataset covers Atlas, Souss, Rif, and Kabyle varieties, making it a valuable resource for speech recognition, translation, and accent identification in an under‑resourced language.

By Mohamed-Amine Chadi, Ezzahra Ait El Arbi, Ismail Khayoub, Aymane Fadili, Yassine Ennhili, Jadjigua Bouali, Hanane Inhid, Mohammed Ameksa, Hajar Mousannif