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Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

ai.meta.com

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Re: Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

#21
First, let me say that this is impressive. And then let me pose some questions:

As a linguist, I would like to know more about the kinds of languages this works well with, or does not work well with. For example, half the world's languages are tone languages, and the way tones work varies greatly among these. Some just have high and low tones, while others are considerably more complicated; Thai has high, mid, low, rising and falling. Also, tone is relative, e.g. a man's high tone might be a woman's low tone. And some African languages have tones whose absolute frequencies vary across an utterance. So transcribing tone is a quite different problem from transcribing phonemes--and yet for many tone languages, the tone is crucial.

There are also rare(r) phonemes, like the clicks in many languages of southern Africa. Of course maybe they've already trained on some of these languages.

The HuggingFace demo says "Supported Languages[:] For this public demo, we've restricted transcription to low-resource languages with error rates below 10%." That's unclear: 10% word error rate, or character/ phoneme error rate? The meta.com page refers to character error rate (CER); a 10% character error rate can imply a much higher word error rate (WER), since most words contain several characters/ phonemes. That said, there are ways to get around that, like using a dictionary to select among different paths through possible character sequences so you only get known words, and adding to that a morphological parser for languages that have lots of affixes (meaning not all the word forms will be in the dictionary--think walk, walks, walked, walking--only the first will be in most dictionaries.)

Enquiring minds want to know!

Re: Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

#22
post #12

This seems like a massive improvement for openly available local ASR. Even the 300M model outperforms whisper-large-v3 according to the paper's benchmarks.

Not sure, I recorded 3 seconds of voice (a single sentence) and the hf demo misrecognized about half of the words.

And moreover, you can not tune those models for practical applications. The model is originally trained on very clean data, so lower layers are also not very stable for diverse inputs. To finetune you have to update the whole model, not just upper layers.

Re: Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

#24

What I really want to know is how well these could work for non-human languages. No, not aliens, but chimpanzees, dolphins, bonobos. We have hundreds or thousands of hours of recordings. What would it take to start working on them?

You can check whale sound recognition project https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08614

Re: Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

#27
post #21

First, let me say that this is impressive. And then let me pose some questions: As a linguist, I would like to know more about the kinds of languages this works well with, or does not work well with. For example, half the world's languages are tone languages, and the way tones work varies greatly among these. Some just have high and low tones, while others are considerably more complicated; Thai has high, mid, low, r…

I'm not an expert but the rule of thumb is to expect something like this:

https://xkcd.com/1838/

Re: Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

#28

What I really want to know is how well these could work for non-human languages. No, not aliens, but chimpanzees, dolphins, bonobos. We have hundreds or thousands of hours of recordings. What would it take to start working on them?

Not tested on that particular model, but the idea has been flying around for some time: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04166v1

Re: Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages

#29
Unfortunately I don't read anything in the paper about improvements to timing/timestamping. In particular unclean word boundaries are hard with wav2vev2.

And their use of LLMs as part of the transcription process makes it likely that they trained the model to correct mispronounciations by the speaker. This lowers CER because the human transcription often corrects for mispronounciations as well, but reduces the ability of the model to actually transcribe what was said.

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