Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition Models for African Languages

arXiv — cs.CLMonday, December 15, 2025 at 5:00:00 AM
  • A recent study benchmarked four advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) models—Whisper, XLS-R, MMS, and W2v-BERT—across 13 African languages, highlighting their performance under varying data conditions. The research found that while MMS and W2v-BERT excel in low-resource settings, XLS-R scales effectively with more data, and Whisper performs well in mid-resource environments.
  • This benchmarking is significant as it provides systematic insights into model selection and data scaling for ASR in African languages, a field previously hindered by limited labeled data and lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks.
  • The findings contribute to ongoing discussions about the efficiency of ASR technologies in low-resource languages, emphasizing the need for tailored approaches to dialect identification and the potential of new frameworks for improving multilingual speech recognition, as seen in recent advancements in related technologies.
— via World Pulse Now AI Editorial System

Was this article worth reading? Share it

Recommended apps based on your readingExplore all apps
Continue Readings
ASR Under the Stethoscope: Evaluating Biases in Clinical Speech Recognition across Indian Languages
NeutralArtificial Intelligence
A systematic audit of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performance in Indian healthcare settings has been conducted, focusing on languages such as Kannada, Hindi, and Indian English. The study compares various ASR models, including Indic Whisper and Google speech to text, and evaluates transcription accuracy across different demographics, revealing significant performance variability and biases based on speaker roles and language use.

Ready to build your own newsroom?

Subscribe to unlock a personalised feed, podcasts, newsletters, and notifications tailored to the topics you actually care about