Paper ID: 2406.19674

Less is More: Accurate Speech Recognition & Translation without Web-Scale Data

Krishna C. Puvvada, Piotr Żelasko, He Huang, Oleksii Hrinchuk, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Kunal Dhawan, Somshubra Majumdar, Elena Rastorgueva, Zhehuai Chen, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg

Recent advances in speech recognition and translation rely on hundreds of thousands of hours of Internet speech data. We argue that state-of-the art accuracy can be reached without relying on web-scale data. Canary - multilingual ASR and speech translation model, outperforms current state-of-the-art models - Whisper, OWSM, and Seamless-M4T on English, French, Spanish, and German languages, while being trained on an order of magnitude less data than these models. Three key factors enables such data-efficient model: (1) a FastConformer-based attention encoder-decoder architecture (2) training on synthetic data generated with machine translation and (3) advanced training techniques: data-balancing, dynamic data blending, dynamic bucketing and noise-robust fine-tuning. The model, weights, and training code will be open-sourced.

Submitted: Jun 28, 2024