Tootfinder

Canary-1B-v2 & Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3: Efficient and High-Performance Models for Multilingual ASR and AST
Monica Sekoyan, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Nune Tadevosyan, Piotr Zelasko, Travis Bartley, Nick Karpov, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14128

Canary-1B-v2 & Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3: Efficient and High-Performance Models for Multilingual ASR and AST
This report introduces Canary-1B-v2, a fast, robust multilingual model for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speech-to-Text Translation (AST). Built with a FastConformer encoder and Transformer decoder, it supports 25 languages primarily European. The model was trained on 1.7M hours of total data samples, including Granary and NeMo ASR Set 3.0, with non-speech audio added to reduce hallucinations for ASR and AST. We describe its two-stage pre-training and fine-tuning process with dynamic d…

The Trump administration has vowed to crack down on what it calls hate speech. It has labeled antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group, a terrorist organization.
And it has sought to punish figures such as TV host Jimmy Kimmel for statements perceived critical of conservative activists.
What the First Amendment makes clear is that it does not just protect the rights of speakers who say things with which Americans agree.
Or, as the Supreme Court said in a separate deci…

How the First Amendment protects Americans’ speech − and how it does not
Free speech is not absolute, nor does the Constitution protect only speech Americans like.

Meta introduces Omnilingual Automatic Speech Recognition, a suite of AI models providing automatic speech recognition capabilities for more than 1,600 languages (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/meta-returns-to-open-source-ai…

Proficiency-Aware Adaptation and Data Augmentation for Robust L2 ASR
Ling Sun, Charlotte Zhu, Shuju Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10738 https://arxiv.org/…

Proficiency-Aware Adaptation and Data Augmentation for Robust L2 ASR
General-purpose ASR underperforms for atypical speakers, such as L2 learners, reinforcing bias and limiting use in education and accessibility. Using the CEFR-graded Speak and Improve corpus, we show that naive fine-tuning of Whisper reduces average WER but simultaneously widens disparities and disproportionately harms lower-level learners. To address this, we propose two strategies: (i) proficiency-aware multitask learning, jointly optimizing ASR with proficiency classification, and (ii) targe…

Articulation-Informed ASR: Integrating Articulatory Features into ASR via Auxiliary Speech Inversion and Cross-Attention Fusion
Ahmed Adel Attia, Jing Liu, Carol Espy Wilson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08585

Articulation-Informed ASR: Integrating Articulatory Features into ASR via Auxiliary Speech Inversion and Cross-Attention Fusion
Prior works have investigated the use of articulatory features as complementary representations for automatic speech recognition (ASR), but their use was largely confined to shallow acoustic models. In this work, we revisit articulatory information in the era of deep learning and propose a framework that leverages articulatory representations both as an auxiliary task and as a pseudo-input to the recognition model. Specifically, we employ speech inversion as an auxiliary prediction task, and th…

Accent-Invariant Automatic Speech Recognition via Saliency-Driven Spectrogram Masking
Mohammad Hossein Sameti, Sepehr Harfi Moridani, Ali Zarean, Hossein Sameti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09528

Accent-Invariant Automatic Speech Recognition via Saliency-Driven Spectrogram Masking
Pre-trained transformer-based models have significantly advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR), yet they remain sensitive to accent and dialectal variations, resulting in elevated word error rates (WER) in linguistically diverse languages such as English and Persian. To address this challenge, we propose an accent-invariant ASR framework that integrates accent and dialect classification into the recognition pipeline. Our approach involves training a spectrogram-based classifier to capture …

Open ASR Leaderboard: Towards Reproducible and Transparent Multilingual and Long-Form Speech Recognition Evaluation
Vaibhav Srivastav, Steven Zheng, Eric Bezzam, Eustache Le Bihan, Nithin Koluguri, Piotr \.Zelasko, Somshubra Majumdar, Adel Moumen, Sanchit Gandhi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06961

Open ASR Leaderboard: Towards Reproducible and Transparent Multilingual and Long-Form Speech Recognition Evaluation
Despite rapid progress, ASR evaluation remains saturated with short-form English, and efficiency is rarely reported. We present the Open ASR Leaderboard, a fully reproducible benchmark and interactive leaderboard comparing 60+ open-source and proprietary systems across 11 datasets, including dedicated multilingual and long-form tracks. We standardize text normalization and report both word error rate (WER) and inverse real-time factor (RTFx), enabling fair accuracy-efficiency comparisons. For E…

Listening or Reading? Evaluating Speech Awareness in Chain-of-Thought Speech-to-Text Translation
Jacobo Romero-D\'iaz, Gerard I. G\'allego, Oriol Pareras, Federico Costa, Javier Hernando, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03115

Listening or Reading? Evaluating Speech Awareness in Chain-of-Thought Speech-to-Text Translation
Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) systems built from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Text Translation (T2TT) modules face two major limitations: error propagation and the inability to exploit prosodic or other acoustic cues. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has recently been introduced, with the expectation that jointly accessing speech and transcription will overcome these issues. Analyzing CoT through attribution methods, robustness evaluations with corrupted transcripts, and p…

Revisiting Direct Speech-to-Text Translation with Speech LLMs: Better Scaling than CoT Prompting?
Oriol Pareras, Gerard I. G\'allego, Federico Costa, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet, Javier Hernando
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03093

Revisiting Direct Speech-to-Text Translation with Speech LLMs: Better Scaling than CoT Prompting?
Recent work on Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) has focused on LLM-based models, introducing the increasingly adopted Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, where the model is guided to first transcribe the speech and then translate it. CoT typically outperforms direct prompting primarily because it can exploit abundant Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Text Translation (T2TT) datasets to explicitly model its steps. In this paper, we systematically compare CoT and Direct prompting unde…