Ramsa: A Large Sociolinguistically Rich Emirati Arabic Speech Corpus for ASR and TTS

Ramsa is a developing 41-hour speech corpus of Emirati Arabic designed to support sociolinguistic research and low-resource language technologies. It contains recordings from structured interviews with native speakers and episodes from national television shows. The corpus features 157 speakers (59 female, 98 male), spans subdialects such as Urban, Bedouin, and Mountain/Shihhi, and covers topics such as cultural heritage, agriculture and sustainability, daily life, professional trajectories, and architecture. It consists of 91 monologic and 79 dialogic recordings, varying in length and recording conditions. A 10\% subset was used to evaluate commercial and open-source models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) in a zero-shot setting to establish initial baselines. Whisper-large-v3-turbo achieved the best ASR performance, with average word and character error rates of 0.268 and 0.144, respectively. MMS-TTS-Ara reported the best mean word and character rates of 0.285 and 0.081, respectively, for TTS. These baselines are competitive but leave substantial room for improvement. The paper highlights the challenges encountered and provides directions for future work.

Reading the Mood Behind Words: Integrating Prosody-Derived Emotional Context into Socially Responsive VR Agents

In VR interactions with embodied conversational agents, users' emotional intent is often conveyed more by how something is said than by what is said. However, most VR agent pipelines rely on speech-to-text processing, discarding prosodic cues and often producing emotionally incongruent responses despite correct semantics. We propose an emotion-context-aware VR interaction pipeline that treats vocal emotion as explicit dialogue context in an LLM-based conversational agent. A real-time speech emotion recognition model infers users' emotional states from prosody, and the resulting emotion labels are injected into the agent's dialogue context to shape response tone and style. Results from a within-subjects VR study (N=30) show significant improvements in dialogue quality, naturalness, engagement, rapport, and human-likeness, with 93.3% of participants preferring the emotion-aware agent.

SilentWear: an Ultra-Low Power Wearable System for EMG-based Silent Speech Recognition

Detecting speech from biosignals is gaining increasing attention due to the potential to develop human-computer interfaces that are noise-robust, privacy-preserving, and scalable for both clinical applications and daily use. However, most existing approaches remain limited by insufficient wearability and the lack of edge-processing capabilities, which are essential for minimally obtrusive, responsive, and private assistive technologies. In this work, we present SilentWear, a fully wearable, textile-based neck interface for EMG signal acquisition and processing. Powered by BioGAP-Ultra, the system enables end-to-end data acquisition from 14 differential channels and on-device speech recognition. SilentWear is coupled with SpeechNet, a lightweight 15k-parameter CNN architecture specifically tailored for EMG-based speech decoding, achieving an average cross-validated accuracy of 84.8$\pm$4.6% and 77.5$\pm$6.6% for vocalized and silent speech, respectively, over eight representative human-machine interaction commands collected over multiple days. We evaluate robustness to repositioning induced by multi-day use. In an inter-session setting, the system achieves average accuracies of 71.1$\pm$8.3% and 59.3\pm2.2% for vocalized and silent speech, respectively. To mitigate performance degradation due to repositioning, we propose an incremental fine-tuning strategy, demonstrating more than 10% accuracy recovery with less than 10 minutes of additional user data. Finally, we demonstrate end-to-end real-time on-device speech recognition on a commercial multi-core microcontroller unit (MCU), achieving an energy consumption of 63.9$μ$J per inference with a latency of 2.47 ms. With a total power consumption of 20.5mW for acquisition, inference, and wireless transmission of results, SilentWear enables continuous operation for more than 27 hours.

Nwāchā Munā: A Devanagari Speech Corpus and Proximal Transfer Benchmark for Nepal Bhasha ASR

Nepal Bhasha (Newari), an endangered language of the Kathmandu Valley, remains digitally marginalized due to the severe scarcity of annotated speech resources. In this work, we introduce Nwāchā Munā, a newly curated 5.39-hour manually transcribed Devanagari speech corpus for Nepal Bhasha, and establish the first benchmark using script-preserving acoustic modeling. We investigate whether proximal cross-lingual transfer from a geographically and linguistically adjacent language (Nepali) can rival large-scale multilingual pretraining in an ultra-low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) setting. Fine-tuning a Nepali Conformer model reduces the Character Error Rate (CER) from a 52.54% zero-shot baseline to 17.59% with data augmentation, effectively matching the performance of the multilingual Whisper-Small model despite utilizing significantly fewer parameters. Our findings demonstrate that proximal transfer within South Asian language clusters serves as a computationally efficient alternative to massive multilingual models. We openly release the dataset and benchmarks to digitally enable the Newari community and foster further research in Nepal Bhasha.

Disentangling Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models for Ambiguous Emotion Prediction

Speech emotion recognition plays an important role in various applications. However, most existing approaches predict a single emotion label, oversimplifying the inherently ambiguous nature of human emotional expression. Recent large audio-language models show promise in generating richer outputs, but their reasoning ability for ambiguous emotional understanding remains limited. In this work, we reformulate ambiguous emotion recognition as a distributional reasoning problem and present the first systematic study of ambiguity-aware reasoning in LALMs. Our framework comprises two complementary components: an ambiguity-aware objective that aligns predictions with human perceptual distributions, and a structured ambiguity-aware chain-of-thought supervision that guides reasoning over emotional cues. Experiments on IEMOCAP and CREMA-D demonstrate consistent improvements across SFT, DPO, and GRPO training strategies.

Using Songs to Improve Kazakh Automatic Speech Recognition

Developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for low-resource languages is hindered by the scarcity of transcribed corpora. This proof-of-concept study explores songs as an unconventional yet promising data source for Kazakh ASR. We curate a dataset of 3,013 audio-text pairs (about 4.5 hours) from 195 songs by 36 artists, segmented at the lyric-line level. Using Whisper as the base recogniser, we fine-tune models under seven training scenarios involving Songs, Common Voice Corpus (CVC), and FLEURS, and evaluate them on three benchmarks: CVC, FLEURS, and Kazakh Speech Corpus 2 (KSC2). Results show that song-based fine-tuning improves performance over zero-shot baselines. For instance, Whisper Large-V3 Turbo trained on a mixture of Songs, CVC, and FLEURS achieves 27.6% normalised WER on CVC and 11.8% on FLEURS, while halving the error on KSC2 (39.3% vs. 81.2%) relative to the zero-shot model. Although these gains remain below those of models trained on the 1,100-hour KSC2 corpus, they demonstrate that even modest song-speech mixtures can yield meaningful adaptation improvements in low-resource ASR. The dataset is released on Hugging Face for research purposes under a gated, non-commercial licence.

Benchmarking Speech Systems for Frontline Health Conversations: The DISPLACE-M Challenge

The DIarization and Speech Processing for LAnguage understanding in Conversational Environments - Medical (DISPLACE-M) challenge introduces a conversational AI benchmark for understanding goal-oriented, real-world medical dialogues. The challenge addresses multi-speaker interactions between frontline health workers and care seekers, characterized by spontaneous, noisy and overlapping speech. As part of the challenge, medical conversational dataset comprising 40 hours of development and 15 hours of blind evaluation recordings was released. We provided baseline systems across 4 tasks - speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition, topic identification and dialogue summarization - to enable consistent benchmarking. System performance is evaluated using diarization error rate (DER), time-constrained minimum-permutation word error rate (tcpWER) and ROUGE-L. This paper describes the Phase-I evaluation - data, tasks and baseline systems - along with the summary of the evaluation results.

An Investigation Into Various Approaches For Bengali Long-Form Speech Transcription and Bengali Speaker Diarization

Bengali remains a low-resource language in speech technology, especially for complex tasks like long-form transcription and speaker diarization. This paper presents a multistage approach developed for the "DL Sprint 4.0 - Bengali Long-Form Speech Recognition" and "DL Sprint 4.0 - Bengali Speaker Diarization" competitions on Kaggle, addressing the challenge of "who spoke when/what" in hour-long recordings. We implemented Whisper Medium fine-tuned on Bengali data (bengaliAI/tugstugi bengaliai-asr whisper-medium) for transcription and integrated pyannote/speaker-diarization-community-1 with our custom-trained segmentation model to handle diverse and noisy acoustic environments. Using a two-pass method with hyperparameter tuning, we achieved a DER of 0.27 on the private leaderboard and 0.19 on the public leaderboard. For transcription, chunking, background noise cleaning, and algorithmic post-processing yielded a WER of 0.38 on the private leaderboard. These results show that targeted tuning and strategic data utilization can significantly improve AI inclusivity for South Asian languages. All relevant code is available at: https://github.com/Short-Potatoes/Bengali-long-form-transcription-and-diarization.git Index Terms: Bengali speech recognition, speaker diarization, Whisper, ASR, low-resource languages, pyannote, voice activity detection

Visual-Informed Speech Enhancement Using Attention-Based Beamforming

Recent studies have demonstrated that incorporating auxiliary information, such as speaker voiceprint or visual cues, can substantially improve Speech Enhancement (SE) performance. However, single-channel methods often yield suboptimal results in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, when there is high reverberation, or in complex scenarios involving dynamic speakers, overlapping speech, or non-stationary noise. To address these issues, we propose a novel Visual-Informed Neural Beamforming Network (VI-NBFNet), which integrates microphone array signal processing and deep neural networks (DNNs) using multimodal input features. The proposed network leverages a pretrained visual speech recognition model to extract lip movements as input features, which serve for voice activity detection (VAD) and target speaker identification. The system is intended to handle both static and moving speakers by introducing a supervised end-to-end beamforming framework equipped with an attention mechanism. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed audiovisual system has achieved better SE performance and robustness for both stationary and dynamic speaker scenarios, compared to several baseline methods.

Towards Orthographically-Informed Evaluation of Speech Recognition Systems for Indian Languages

Evaluating ASR systems for Indian languages is challenging due to spelling variations, suffix splitting flexibility, and non-standard spellings in code-mixed words. Traditional Word Error Rate (WER) often presents a bleaker picture of system performance than what human users perceive. Better aligning evaluation with real-world performance requires capturing permissible orthographic variations, which is extremely challenging for under-resourced Indian languages. Leveraging recent advances in LLMs, we propose a framework for creating benchmarks that capture permissible variations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that OIWER, by accounting for orthographic variations, reduces pessimistic error rates (an average improvement of 6.3 points), narrows inflated model gaps (e.g., Gemini-Canary performance difference drops from 18.1 to 11.5 points), and aligns more closely with human perception than prior methods like WER-SN by 4.9 points.