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arXiv · 2305.15760

Svarah: Evaluating English ASR Systems on Indian Accents

Tahir Javed·Sakshi Joshi·Vignesh Nagarajan·Sai Sundaresan·Janki Nawale·Abhigyan Raman·Kaushal Bhogale·Pratyush Kumar·Mitesh M. Khapra
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Abstract

India is the second largest English-speaking country in the world with a speaker base of roughly 130 million. Thus, it is imperative that automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for English should be evaluated on Indian accents. Unfortunately, Indian speakers find a very poor representation in existing English ASR benchmarks such as LibriSpeech, Switchboard, Speech Accent Archive, etc. In this work, we address this gap by creating Svarah, a benchmark that contains 9.6 hours of transcribed English audio from 117 speakers across 65 geographic locations throughout India, resulting in a diverse range of accents. Svarah comprises both read speech and spontaneous conversational data, covering various domains, such as history, culture, tourism, etc., ensuring a diverse vocabulary. We evaluate 6 open source ASR models and 2 commercial ASR systems on Svarah and show that there is clear scope for improvement on Indian accents. Svarah as well as all our code will be publicly available.

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Tahir Javed, Sakshi Joshi, Vignesh Nagarajan, Sai Sundaresan, Janki Nawale, Abhigyan Raman, Kaushal Bhogale, Pratyush Kumar, Mitesh M. Khapra. 2023-05-25. Svarah: Evaluating English ASR Systems on Indian Accents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15760

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