Abstract:Long-form speech recognition is an application area of increasing research focus. ASR models based on multi-head attention (MHA) are ill-suited to long-form ASR because of their quadratic complexity in sequence length. We build on recent work that has investigated linear complexity recurrent attention (RA) layers for ASR. We find that bidirectional RA layers can match the accuracy of MHA for both short- and long-form applications. We present a strong limited-context attention (LCA) baseline, and show that RA layers are just as accurate while being more efficient. We develop a long-form training paradigm which further improves RA performance, leading to better accuracy than LCA with 44% higher throughput. We also present Direction Dropout, a novel regularization method that improves accuracy, provides fine-grained control of the accuracy/throughput trade-off of bidirectional RA, and enables a new alternating directions decoding mode with even higher throughput.
Abstract:Today, we are open-sourcing our core speech recognition and diarization models for non-commercial use. We are releasing both a full production pipeline for developers as well as pared-down research models for experimentation. Rev hopes that these releases will spur research and innovation in the fast-moving domain of voice technology. The speech recognition models released today outperform all existing open source speech recognition models across a variety of long-form speech recognition domains.