Voice agents in noisy environments
Summary
A speech company trained a model that cancels noise and identifies the primary speaker, achieving 50% lower word error rate on leading ASR models in noisy environments.
Similar Articles
@MaxForAI: If you are working on voice agents, you should try this project. A team from NTU, NUS, and Shanghai AI Lab released: Mega-ASR. This fully open-source ASR is built on Qwen3-ASR, aiming to break the long-standing bottleneck of ASR performance in noisy, reverberant, or other impaired real-world environments...
NTU, NUS, and Shanghai AI Lab jointly released Mega-ASR, a fully open-source ASR model built on Qwen3-ASR. Using the Voices-in-the-Wild-2M dataset and progressive acoustic-to-semantic optimization, it achieves up to 30% relative Word Error Rate (WER) reduction in real-world noisy environments. With only 1.7B parameters, it enables efficient inference on consumer-grade hardware.
Can Voice Agents Handle Bilingual Customers? Benchmarking Frontier ASR on Code-Switched Speech
ServiceNow AI releases a benchmark and dataset for evaluating automatic speech recognition (ASR) on code-switched speech across four language pairs (Spanish-English, French-English, Canadian French-English, German-English) in enterprise HR and IT scenarios, finding that current frontier ASR models still struggle with code-switching, leading to higher error rates.
@FeitengLi: Actually, these problems can be well solved: 1. Ditch whisper, switch to an ASR model. Qwen3-ASR is great with few hallucinations, and there are other ASR options. Whisper has many hallucinations and requires 30s segments. Qwen3-ASR gets more accurate with longer audio, supporting up to 20…
Recommends using Qwen3-ASR instead of Whisper to reduce hallucinations, using LattifAI tools for precise audio-text alignment and subtitle generation, and introducing their own OmniVAD-Kit project for voice activity detection.
Transcribing Children's Speech: ASR Performance and Obtaining Reliable Orthographic Transcriptions
This paper evaluates nine ASR models (Whisper, Parakeet, Wav2Vec2) on Dutch child speech datasets JASMIN and DART, finding that fine-tuned Whisper-medium achieves the best performance (WER 5.54% on JASMIN, 70.37% on DART). It also proposes a selection method to automatically identify correctly pronounced utterances with high precision, reducing the need for manual verification.
Towards Human-Like Interactive Speech Recognition With Agentic Correction and Semantic Evaluation
This paper introduces Agentic ASR, an interactive speech recognition framework that uses semantic correction and reasoning-based editing to reduce semantic errors through multi-turn refinement. It also proposes a new sentence-level semantic error rate metric and an interactive simulation system for benchmarking.