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