arXiv AI By Andoni Sudupe, Inma Hernaez, Ander Arriandiaga, Christoforos Souganidis, Ibon Saratxaga, Eva Navas

Developing a Speech Language Model for Basque

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The paper introduces the first open Speech Language Model for Basque, built on the LLaMA‑Omni architecture and a Latxa backbone, aimed at low‑latency, end‑to‑end spoken interaction. To overcome data scarcity, the authors translated the English VoiceAssistant‑400K corpus into Basque and synthesized audio with a Basque TTS system. Evaluation shows the model achieves a content quality score of 3.86/5, a 9.94% word error rate for intelligibility, and a 3.07 UTMOS for audio quality, demonstrating the feasibility of advanced spoken interaction in a low‑resource language.

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