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This paper introduces techniques for the second MLC-SLM Challenge, including random leading-silence cropping and synthetic data generation to enhance multilingual conversational speech tasks, achieving improved accuracy and reduced error rates.
Talkify is a free, open-source macOS dictation app built on Apple's SpeechAnalyzer for instant, on-device voice transcription with low latency and multi-language support, living in the notch.
This paper presents a controlled benchmark comparing six multilingual pre-trained ASR models on Nepali speech, finding Whisper-Large-v3-Turbo and IndicWav2Vec perform best, while CTC decoders offer up to 29x faster inference. It provides the first standardized efficiency-aware reference numbers for Nepali ASR.
A developer demonstrates a complete offline voice-to-action agent on Android using small local models (Silero VAD, Parakeet-EOU STT, FunctionGemma 270M, Pocket TTS), running in ~1.2 GB with no cloud dependencies.
This paper presents Easper, an open-source no-code ASR pipeline that lets field linguists fine-tune models like Whisper from ELAN annotations, and evaluates data selection strategies for bootstrapping ASR on low-resource Vanuatu languages.
This paper introduces DonorRank, a learning-to-rank framework for selecting effective donor languages in low-resource cross-lingual speech recognition, evaluated on Indic and African language corpora. It demonstrates improved donor selection over genetic-similarity and high-resource heuristics, and provides insights into transfer patterns for multilingual ASR.
This paper argues that single-run evaluations in low-resource ASR are unreliable and demonstrates with a new multi-seed Garhwali ASR benchmark that many reported gains vanish under seed-level testing, while standard CTC with w2v-BERT 2.0 remains the most robust approach.
This paper analyzes multimodal systems for the CHiME-9 MCoRec cocktail-party scenario, comparing design strategies such as audio-visual target speech separation, improved recognition, and LLM-based conversational grouping, finding that speech overlap alone does not explain performance differences.
Vocal Slice is a desktop application for audio editing that uses on-device Whisper transcription to allow users to select and export clips by highlighting text in the transcript, designed for podcasters and voice professionals.
VoiceGecko is an open-source, local voice-to-text tool being showcased on Product Hunt.
parakeet.wgsl enables fast, accurate NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B V2 speech transcription entirely in the browser using raw WebGPU compute shaders and SIMD WASM, with a live demo and open-source library.
NVIDIA's entire speech stack—ASR, TTS, and codec—is now quantized to GGUF and runs locally on-device via NeMo-Speech.cpp, with new model releases for Magpie-TTS, Nemotron Speech Streaming, and Parakeet.
This paper introduces MERaLiON-GR, a speech gender recognition model for English and Southeast Asian languages, fine-tuned from MERaLiON-SpeechEncoder-2 with LoRA and an ECAPA-TDNN head, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multilingual benchmarks.
LiveTranscriber is an open-source iOS app that runs Whisper, Qwen3-ASR, Nemotron, MOSS, and Qwen3 fully offline on iPhone, offering speech transcription, multi-speaker support, summaries, and real-time translation. The developer shares the engineering challenges and invites feedback from ASR and on-device AI communities.
Microsoft Research highlights new research on SocialRL for small language model negotiation, PazaBench V2 for African language speech evaluation, EvoLib for agent experience learning, improved A/B testing methods, and AI-driven precision oncology.
Zen Whisper is a Mac app offering on-device dictation that can type into any application.
Audio8's open-source ARK-ASR-3B claims the #1 spot on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with a 4.76 Mean WER, while their 0.6B model also ranks in the Top 5, showcasing a competitive open speech stack.
Voice Memory introduces an inference-only scheme for agentic speech recognition where a frozen corrector uses a per-domain memory file to decide per utterance whether to act or abstain, reducing word error rate across multiple domains without weight updates.
This paper evaluates forced alignment for Hindi-English code-mixed speech using the Montreal Forced Aligner, demonstrating that bootstrapping strategies and code-mixed training data achieve a tenfold improvement in alignment accuracy over monolingual alternatives.
MoLGE assigns dedicated expert modules to clusters of similar languages in a mixture-of-experts framework for large-scale multilingual ASR, achieving improvements across 495 languages with minimal parameter increase.