MEUSLI: a Multilingual Projector for LLM-based ASR and Beyond

Lightweight projectors are an established way to connect pre-trained speech encoders with large language models (LLMs), mapping acoustic features into token-level embeddings for tasks like ASR and spoken question answering. Existing systems, however, typically only support a few languages and are often limited to English. We introduce MEUSLI, the first open-science multilingual projector family that links a Whisper encoder with open-source multilingual LLMs, enabling fully open-source end-to-end ASR in 28 European languages. MEUSLI extends prior monolingual pipelines, delivering strong results across high- and low-resource languages. Using proper continual leaning techniques, MEUSLI can be easily extended to other languages not seen in training. We further demonstrate that the MEUSLI projector can be leveraged beyond ASR, enabling multilingual speech translation and topic identification with only a few hours of task specific supervision per language. Overall, MEUSLI provides a solid foundation for multilingual speech understanding tasks, supporting scalable and inclu- sive open-source SpeechLLM

Developing automatic verbatim transcripts for international multilingual meetings: an end-to-end solution

This paper presents an end-to-end solution for the creation of fully automated conference meeting transcripts and their machine translations into various languages. This tool has been developed at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) using in-house developed speech-to-text (S2T) and machine translation (MT) components. Beyond describing data collection and fine-tuning, resulting in a highly customized and robust system, this paper describes the architecture and evolution of the technical components as well as highlights the business impact and benefits from the user side. We also point out particular challenges in the evolution and adoption of the system and how the new approach created a new product and replaced existing established workflows in conference management documentation.