arXiv AI By Stephen E. Moore, Akwasi Asare, Mich-Seth Owusu, Paul Azunre, Joel Budu, Lawrence A. Adu-Gyamfi

Benchmarking and Domain Adaptation of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for Adolescent Health Communication in Ghanaian Languages

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This study evaluates automatic speech recognition (ASR) for adolescent health communication in Twi, Dagbani, and Ewe by benchmarking five ASR systems on a Bible corpus and a domain-specific ASRH dataset, then performing supervised domain adaptation with a fine‑tuned Qwen3-ASR-0.6B model. Fine‑tuning significantly lowered word and character error rates, especially for Ewe, and the adapted model was deployed in the KasaHealth voice‑first application, which received high user approval and highlighted remaining domain gaps. The work demonstrates that in‑domain data, rather than model size or computational resources, is the primary limitation for effective ASR in these languages.

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