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arXiv · 2506.02443

Breaking the Barriers of Text-Hungry and Audio-Deficient AI

Abstract

While global linguistic diversity spans more than 7164 recognized languages, the current dominant architecture of machine intelligence remains fundamentally biased toward written text. This bias excludes over 700 million people particularly in rural and remote regions who are audio-literate. In this work, we introduce a fully textless, audio-to-audio machine intelligence framework designed to serve this underserved population, and all the people who prefer audio-efficiency. Our contributions include novel Audio-to-Audio translation architectures that bypass text entirely, including spectrogram-, scalogram-, wavelet-, and unit-based models. Central to our approach is the Multiscale Audio-Semantic Transform (MAST), a representation that encodes tonal, prosodic, speaker, and expressive features. We further integrate MAST into a fractional diffusion of mean-field-type framework powered by fractional Brownian motion. It enables the generation of high-fidelity, semantically consistent speech without reliance on textual supervision. The result is a robust and scalable system capable of learning directly from raw audio, even in languages that are unwritten or rarely digitized. This work represents a fundamental shift toward audio-native machine intelligence systems, expanding access to language technologies for communities historically left out of the current machine intelligence ecosystem.

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Hamidou Tembine, Issa Bamia, Massa NDong, Bakary Coulibaly, Oumar Issiaka Traore, Moussa Traore, Moussa Sanogo, Mamadou Eric Sangare, Salif Kante, Daryl Noupa Yongueng, Hafiz Tiomoko Ali, Malik Tiomoko, Frejus Laleye, Boualem Djehiche, Wesmanegda Elisee Dipama, Idris Baba Saje, Hammid Mohammed Ibrahim, Moumini Sanogo, Marie Coursel Nininahazwe, Abdul-Latif Siita, Haine Mhlongo, Teddy Nelvy Dieu Merci Kouka, Mariam Serine Jeridi, Mutiyamuogo Parfait Mupenge, Lekoueiry Dehah, Abdoul Aziz Bio Sidi Bouko, Wilfried Franceslas Zokoue, Odette Richette Sambila, Alina RS Mbango, Mady Diagouraga, Oumarou Moussa Sanoussi, Gizachew Dessalegn, Mohamed Lamine Samoura, Bintou Laetitia Audrey Coulibaly. 2025-06-03. Breaking the Barriers of Text-Hungry and Audio-Deficient AI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02443

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