Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2506.02545

On the Language and Gender Biases in PSTN, VoIP and Neural Audio Codecs

Kemal Altwlkany·Amar Kuric·Emanuel Lacic
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on fairness and inclusivity within speech technology, particularly in areas such as automatic speech recognition and speech sentiment analysis. When audio is transcoded prior to processing, as is the case in streaming or real-time applications, any inherent bias in the coding mechanism may result in disparities. This not only affects user experience but can also have broader societal implications by perpetuating stereotypes and exclusion. Thus, it is important that audio coding mechanisms are unbiased. In this work, we contribute towards the scarce research with respect to language and gender biases of audio codecs. By analyzing the speech quality of over 2 million multilingual audio files after transcoding through a representative subset of codecs (PSTN, VoIP and neural), our results indicate that PSTN codecs are strongly biased in terms of gender and that neural codecs introduce language biases.

Explore related subjects

cs.SDeess.AS

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Kemal Altwlkany, Amar Kuric, Emanuel Lacic. 2025-06-03. On the Language and Gender Biases in PSTN, VoIP and Neural Audio Codecs. https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2025-481

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 Technical Report

Recently, large language model (LLM) based ASR models have achieved significant progress, yet they generally lack support for multi-speaker scenarios, where the cocktail party problem remains a critical bottleneck for further advancing ASR. Existing TS-ASR methods, including end-to-end architectures with speaker embeddings and latest LLM-based explorations suffer from degraded single-speaker performance and the inability to reject when the target speaker is absent. In this paper, we propose Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1, an LLM-based end-to-end TS-ASR architecture. By utilizing reference speech as voiceprint prompts, it directly transcribes the target speaker's speech without requiring speech separation. Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 maintains competitive performance in single-speaker scenarios, comparable to mainstream ASR models. It also features a negative sample rejection capability, outputting empty text when the target speaker is absent from the mixed speech. Additionally, Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 supports a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning mode to provide explicit reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on various synthetic and real-world multispeaker benchmarks demonstrate that Xiaomi-CocktailASR-1 achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the cocktail party problem through a unified architecture that balances multispeaker and single-speaker recognition accuracy, along with rejection capability.

cs.SD↗
arXiv2026

EConv-TasNet: Efficient Conv-TasNet for Effective Speech Separation

Conv-TasNet has served as a strong baseline for time-domain speech separation, and many studies have extended it with advanced architectures such as dual-path networks, U-Nets, and attention mechanisms. However, these methods often introduce high computational cost and complexity, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. To address this issue, we propose eConv-TasNet, an efficient variant of Conv-TasNet that improves both effectiveness and efficiency without relying on resource-intensive modules. The proposed model consists of a group-wise early-splitting (GES) module and a multi-group feature aggregation (MGFA) module. GES generates discriminative speaker embeddings at intermediate stages, while MGFA progressively aggregates these group-level representations for refined mask estimation. Experimental results show that eConv-TasNet reduces model size by 22.4%, accelerates inference by 18.9%, and improves SI-SNRi by 14.0%-28.0% across three public benchmarks. Moreover, it achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while requiring significantly fewer parameters and lower inference cost. These results demonstrate a favorable efficiency-effectiveness trade-off for edge deployment.

cs.SD↗