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
arXiv AI
Jun 26

SamaVaani: Auditing and Debiasing Multilingual Clinical ASR for Indian Languages

arXiv:2606. 26901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used to document clinical encounters, yet its reliability in multilingual and demographically diverse Indian healthcare context remains largely unknown.

By Subham Kumar, Prakrithi Shivaprakash, Abhishek Manoharan, Astut Kurariya, Diptadhi Mukherjee, Prabhat Chand, Pratima Murthy, Koustav Rudra, Lekhansh Shukla, Animesh Mukherjee
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The paper evaluates bias in phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, focusing on WhisperIPA and ZIPA, which produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions. Using multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English datasets, the authors compare model-generated IPA against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) outputs with both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a new Soft PER metric that allows linguistically similar substitutions. The study finds persistent disparities across language, gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, even when accounting for acceptable phonemic variation.

By Maneesha Rani Saha, Catherine Bao, Neal Patwari