arXiv Computation and Language By Kirill Borodin, Vasilii Kudryavtsev, Nikita Vasiliev, Grach Mkrtchian

Measuring the Verifier's Floor: How Much Apparent Rare-Word Text-to-Speech Error Is ASR Error?

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The paper investigates how much of the apparent error in text-to-speech (TTS) systems is actually due to automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors. By transcribing human recordings of test sentences, the authors find that ASR systems miss 33–67% of very rare words on LibriSpeech and FLEURS, and all three recognizers miss 22–42% of such words. Using multiple recognizer families reduces the apparent TTS error on rare words but still leaves them as the hardest to evaluate, indicating that ignoring ASR misses biases the assessment and that a listening test is required.

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