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.
arXiv:2609. 11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized.
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.
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.
arXiv:2609.36920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Comprehensive evaluations of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Iberian languages remain limited, and low-resource languages, biases, and efficienc...
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...
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2606. 03219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: African languages have very little labelled data, and it is unclear if augmenting the quantity of annotation data reliably enhances downstream performance.
arXiv:2608. 12327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual pretrained models nominally support Nepali, yet no controlled benchmark has compared them under a single fine-tuning protocol.
arXiv:2607. 23808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce Indic DiarBench, a speaker diarization and ASR benchmark dataset spanning all 22 scheduled languages of India.
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...