AfriBED: a Speech Recognition Bias Evaluation Dataset for Low Resource African Languages

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains challenging for low-resource languages, where the scarcity of transcribed speech limits the development of accurate systems. This challenge is particularly acute for African languages such as Ewe, which has millions of speakers but remains underrepresented in publicly available ASR resources and benchmarks. In this work, we consolidate, normalize, and partition existing Ewe speech resources into a standardized 174-hour Ewe ASR benchmark, the largest to date to our knowledge. We fine-tune and evaluate pretrained speech models, including Whisper and AfriHuBERT, to establish strong baselines on our benchmark. Whisper-medium achieves a word error rate (WER) of 37.98%, while AfriHuBERT achieves 39.70% on the test set. We further provide a qualitative analysis of common recognition errors. We release the benchmark under the name Nufo, derived from the Ewe word for "talk", accompanied by models and evaluation resources, to facilitate future research on Ewe and other underrepresented African languages.

Recent large language models (LLMs) show strong speech recognition and translation capabilities for high-resource languages. However, African languages remain dramatically underrepresented in benchmarks, limiting their practical use in low-resource settings. While early benchmarks tested African languages and accents, they lacked exhaustive real-world noise and granular domain evaluations. We present AfriVox-v2, a comprehensive benchmark designed to test speech models under realistic African deployment conditions. AfriVox-v2 introduces "in the wild" unscripted audio for all supported languages. We also introduce strict domain verticalization, evaluating model accuracy across ten sectors including government, finance, health, and agriculture and conducting targeted tests on numbers and named entities. Finally, we benchmark a new generation of speech models, including Sahara-v2, Gemini 3 Flash, and the Omnilingual CTC models. Our results expose the true generalization gap of modern speech models in specialized, noisy African contexts and provide a reliable blueprint for developers building localized voice AI.

We present Cardamom, a micro-dialectal Arabic speech dataset designed to support fine-grained evaluation and adaptation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Community-curated by native speakers familiar with the represented varieties, Cardamom contains approximately 40 hours of transcribed YouTube speech spanning 21 micro-dialects across Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. Each segment is annotated with one or more operational micro-dialect labels, code-switching information, and utterance-level perceived gender, enabling analysis of sub-country variation that is obscured by conventional country-level labels. We describe the collection and annotation process, motivate the micro-dialect inventory linguistically, and benchmark four multilingual ASR systems in zero-shot and adapted settings. The strongest zero-shot system obtains 43.47% aggregate WER, with particularly high error rates on Mauritanian and Lebanese varieties; adaptation on Cardamom reduces its WER to 35.21%. Audio-based identification experiments further show that the annotations provide a learnable prediction target, with a dedicated classifier reaching 85.57% accuracy on 21-way micro-dialect identification. Cardamom provides a resource for studying localized dialectal variation and developing Arabic speech systems with broader regional coverage.