arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

ufakzeka-kulak: Building and Evaluating a 31.6M-Parameter Turkish Speech Recognizer from Scratch

ufakzeka-kulak is an open Turkish speech‑to‑text model with 31.6 M parameters, built using a FastConformer encoder, a token‑and‑duration transducer (TDT), and a CTC head. It was trained from scratch on 4,977 hours of data—281 hours of human transcription and 4,696 hours of machine‑generated subtitles that were verified by a second reading—under licenses permitting commercial use. The model outputs cased, punctuated Turkish text with numbers written as words, achieving a normalised WER of 0.0921 on FLEURS Turkish and 0.0916 on Common Voice 27.0 Turkish, outperforming Whisper base and small models, and it is released under Apache‑2.0.

By Sait Furkan Teke (ufak AI)
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Building and Evaluating a Synthetic Bengali Speech Resource for Telecom Customer Care

The paper introduces a synthetic Bengali speech dataset tailored for telecom customer‑care applications, comprising 10,000 audio‑text pairs (≈26.82 hours) with predefined train, validation, and test splits. The data were generated using OmniVoice voice‑cloning, and include both original and normalized transcripts for ASR/STT use. Automatic intelligibility evaluation with a fine‑tuned Whisper model shows an average WER of 2.54% and CER of 0.59%, indicating strong text‑audio consistency, while the authors note limitations of synthetic speech and STT‑based evaluation.

By Kawshik Kumar Paul, Md. Nafiul Alam Fuji