Long-Form Speech Recognition
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21 papers1 paper in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.
Recent advances in speech language models have improved automatic speech recognition (ASR) for long-form audio. However, accurately and consistently transcribing domain-specific terminology remains challenging. Motivated by the world knowledge and contextual capability of large language models (LLMs), we propose Agentic-GER, an LLM-based agent for terminology correction in long-form speech. The agent uses global context from the full transcript to identify suspicious terms and resolve ambiguous hypotheses. It selectively re-transcribes the source speech to check candidate corrections, and uses accepted edits to guide subsequent decisions. Experiments with four LLMs and two ASR systems on GigaSpeechBench show consistent terminology improvements in both Chinese and English, with and without thinking. On Chinese speech, Agentic-GER achieves up to a 36.8% relative reduction in biased character error rate (B-CER) over the Whisper baseline.
DiTAR+: Dual Optimization for Robust Autoregressive Diffusion Speech Synthesis
Continuous-latent Autoregressive Diffusion Transformer (AR-DiT) models have demonstrated immense potential in zero-shot speech generation. However, they still suffer from limited decoding stability when synthesizing long utterances or complex linguistic structures. This instability primarily stems from a restricted historical receptive field and an acoustic inertia dependency within the diffusion decoder, which causes the model to ignore semantic conditions. To address these challenges, we propose DiTAR+, a dual-optimization framework. First, we introduce Dilated Context Sampling to expand the macro-level historical receptive field without violating physical temporal continuity, thereby preventing cumulative error propagation. Second, we propose Hierarchical Acoustic Masking to prevent shallow layers from attending to acoustic pre-context, explicitly decoupling semantic alignment from acoustic detail reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that our framework effectively mitigates pronunciation errors and semantic hallucinations, enhances generation robustness on challenging sentences, and maintains exceptionally high speaker similarity throughout the entirety of long-form utterances. On the linguistically challenging ZH-Hard set, DiTAR+ reduces the word error rate from 12.478% to 9.893%, and on extended utterances of 25 to 35 seconds it improves speaker similarity from 0.741 to 0.759 while simultaneously lowering the word error rate from 2.778% to 2.173%, outperforming both discrete-token and pure flow-matching baselines.
Context-Aware Interleaved Batching for WhisperX
While WhisperX accelerates speech transcription via intra-audio batching, it isolates audio segments, losing the historical context needed for coherent punctuation and terminology transcription. Conversely, standard Whisper retains context sequentially but suffers from slow inference and hallucination loops. To achieve the best of both worlds, we propose Context-Aware Interleaved Batching. By using VAD-derived segment boundaries, our algorithm stabilizes Whisper's text conditioning, allowing us to safely maintain continuous historical context across batched audio segments. As demonstrated on long-form audio benchmarks, this approach reduces Word Error Rate (WER) and improves proper noun transcription, all while maintaining high-throughput inference speeds.
Stable Autoregressive Speech Generation with Low-Frame-Rate High-Dimensional Continuous Tokens
Balancing sequence length, representational capacity, and long-horizon stability is a central problem in autoregressive (AR) speech and audio generation. Representations with higher frame rates or greater capacity can preserve more signal detail, but they also make streaming generation more vulnerable to distribution drift and AR error accumulation. Conversely, shorter and more compressed representations simplify AR modeling, but their limited bandwidth may discard important components and constrain the upper bound of reconstruction fidelity and generation quality. We ask whether a low-frame-rate, high-dimensional, high-bandwidth continuous representation can be co-designed with a streaming generation framework to support robust high-fidelity reconstruction, strong single-token predictability, and superior long-horizon stability. We decompose this goal into two coupled problems: what geometric and statistical properties a high-dimensional representation space should have, and how an AR continuous-token generator should be structured to resist error accumulation. Accordingly, we propose Locodec, a locally encoded codec that shapes its representation space to improve the interpolatability of a lower-dimensional core manifold and the identifiability of the native high-dimensional coordinates, thereby improving the predictability of high-dimensional high-bandwidth tokens. We also propose MP-ELD, a single-token AR flow-matching framework that uses multi-path information routing and residual classifier-free guidance to mitigate error accumulation. Experiments with 8-Hz, 768-dimensional tokens show that our design preserves reconstruction quality, improves single-token predictability, achieves competitive WER, and maintains stable long-form synthesis, without using external SSL/ASR models, pretrained text language models, or post-training stages.
ParaASR: Multi-Token Prediction for Fast and Long-Context LLM-Based Speech Recognition
Audio-encoder-LLM-decoder architectures have become the dominant paradigm for modern automatic speech recognition (ASR), improving transcription quality through large-scale language modeling. However, the cost of autoregressive decoding scales with decoder size, creating a fundamental trade-off between recognition quality and serving latency. We argue this trade-off is not inherent: unlike open-ended text generation, ASR outputs are strongly anchored to the input speech signal, providing a natural inductive bias toward high-parallelism decoding. Building on this, we introduce ParaASR, an ASR system that leverages Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) to let a 4B LLM decoder emit multiple tokens per forward step. Starting from a publicly available audio-language foundation, the model first establishes a robust autoregressive recognizer and then aligns five future-token branches through a staged optimization recipe. At inference, it proposes a six-token continuation per step and admits only the verified prefix into the transcript, preserving the safety of standard autoregressive decoding. The average accepted length reaches 5.0 out of 6 proposed tokens, confirming that the deterministic structure of speech makes ASR an especially natural setting for multi-token decoding. ParaASR further retains a native 32K-context window and transcribes up to 30 minutes of audio in a single pass. Across diverse benchmarks, it attains average error rates of 2.97%, 3.68%, and 3.70% on Chinese, English, and long-form evaluations, respectively, while reaching a real-time factor (RTF) as low as 0.0053. These results show that decoder scaling, low-latency inference, and long-context transcription need not be competing goals when future-token proposals are anchored by the acoustic signal and guarded by autoregressive verification.
MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data
Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.
TRADE: Transducer-Augmented Decoder for Speech LLM
Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) lack a principled mechanism for streaming inference: their label-synchronous generation has no acoustic-frame alignment, making real-time decoding and end-of-utterance detection difficult. We propose TRADE TRansducer-Augmented DEcoder, which augments a multimodal LLM with a transducer branch that shares the audio encoder and uses the LLM's hidden states directly as the prediction network -- coupling frame-synchronous acoustic alignment with the LLM's linguistic reasoning. Three design choices make the system accurate, streamable, and long-form capable: (1)Tightly coupled dual vocabularies -- a compact transducer vocabulary derived from the LLM vocabulary, enabling zero-cost score fusion; (2)Chunk-synchronized streaming training with gradient stopping, eliminating the train-inference mismatch at offline-equivalent memory cost; and (3)Localized Decoder Audio Attention (LDAA), a causal sliding window that caps KV-cache memory independently of utterance length. A single TRADE checkpoint supports offline and streaming decoding across a continuous range of latency operating points. TRADE achieves 6.71% average WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard, while the streaming recognition with 960ms chunk size reaches 8.40% from the same checkpoint. On long-form speech, it obtains 3.64% WER on TED-LIUM and 10.88% on Earnings-22 without external segmentation. TRADE provides sentence-end punctuation timestamps that, when combined with acoustic voice activity detection (VAD), improve end-of-utterance detection by +0.03 F_1 over acoustic VAD alone.
MURMUR: An Efficient Inference System for Long-Form ASR
Long-form automatic speech recognition (ASR) requires both high accuracy and low latency, but existing systems force a trade-off between the two. Chunk-based pipelines process audio in parallel windows for low latency, but lose cross-chunk context and need brittle heuristics to align speakers and timestamps at boundaries. Long-context ASR models resolve everything in a single pass for better accuracy, but are an order of magnitude slower. We propose Murmur, an inference system that overcomes this trade-off by operating at two levels. At the inter-chunk level, we revisit the chunk-based pipeline for modern long-context ASR, treating chunk size as a tunable hyperparameter, and show that intermediate chunk sizes strike a good balance of accuracy and latency. At the intra-chunk level, we exploit attention sparsity through a sliding window KV cache eviction policy applied to both output and speech tokens. On AMI-IHM, Murmur matches single-pass accuracy while reducing latency by 4.2x, with further gains from token eviction at less than 1% relative tcpWER degradation. The code of Murmur is available at https://github.com/uw-syfi/Murmur.
Bangla-WhisperDiar: Fine-Tuning Whisper and PyAnnote for Bangla Long-Form Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarization
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization in Bangla remain challenging due to long form recordings, diverse acoustic conditions, and significant speaker variability. This work addresses these two core tasks in Bangla spoken language understanding by developing robust systems for long form ASR and speaker diarization. For ASR (Problem 1), we fine tune the tugstugi bengaliai regional asr whisper medium model on a custom-curated dataset of approximately 15,000 chunked and aligned Bangla audio segments, employing full weight training with extensive data augmentation including noise injection, reverb simulation, echo, clipping distortion, and pitch/time perturbation. For speaker diarization (Problem 2), we fine-tune the pyannote/segmentation-3.0 model using PyTorch Lightning on the competition annotated diarization dataset, swapping the fine-tuned segmentation backbone into the pyannote/speaker-diarization-community-1 pipeline while retaining the pretrained speaker embedding and clustering components. Our ASR system achieves a Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.2441, while our diarization system achieves a Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 0.2392, both evaluated on the test set, demonstrating notable improvements over the respective pretrained baselines. We describe our complete pipeline, including data preprocessing, text normalization, audio augmentation, training strategies, inference optimization, and post-processing for both tasks.
AppTek Call-Center Dialogues: A Multi-Accent Long-Form Benchmark for English ASR
Evaluating English ASR systems for conversational AI applications remains difficult, as many publicly available corpora are either pre-segmented into short segments, consist of read or prepared speech, or lack explicit dialect annotations to evaluate robustness for a diverse user base. This work presents the AppTek Call-Center Dialogues corpus, a collection of spontaneous, role-played agent-customer conversations spanning fourteen English accents covering sixteen service-oriented scenarios. The dataset was commissioned specifically for evaluation and none of the audio or text was publicly available prior to release, reducing the risk of overlap with existing large-scale pretraining corpora. We benchmark a set of open-source ASR systems under different segmentation approaches. Results show substantial variation across accents and segmentation methods, indicating that good performance on general American English benchmarks does not necessarily generalize to other accents.
Borderless Long Speech Synthesis
Most existing text-to-speech (TTS) systems either synthesize speech sentence by sentence and stitch the results together, or drive synthesis from plain-text dialogues alone. Both approaches leave models with little understanding of global context or paralinguistic cues, making it hard to capture real-world phenomena such as multi-speaker interactions (interruptions, overlapping speech), evolving emotional arcs, and varied acoustic environments. We introduce the Borderless Long Speech Synthesis framework for agent-centric, borderless long audio synthesis. Rather than targeting a single narrow task, the system is designed as a unified capability set spanning VoiceDesigner, multi-speaker synthesis, Instruct TTS, and long-form text synthesis. On the data side, we propose a "Labeling over filtering/cleaning" strategy and design a top-down, multi-level annotation schema we call Global-Sentence-Token. On the model side, we adopt a backbone with a continuous tokenizer and add Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning together with Dimension Dropout, both of which markedly improve instruction following under complex conditions. We further show that the system is Native Agentic by design: the hierarchical annotation doubles as a Structured Semantic Interface between the LLM Agent and the synthesis engine, creating a layered control protocol stack that spans from scene semantics down to phonetic detail. Text thereby becomes an information-complete, wide-band control channel, enabling a front-end LLM to convert inputs of any modality into structured generation commands, extending the paradigm from Text2Speech to borderless long speech synthesis.
MOSS-TTSD: Text to Spoken Dialogue Generation
Spoken dialogue generation is crucial for applications like podcasts, dynamic commentary, and entertainment content, but poses significant challenges compared to single-utterance text-to-speech (TTS). Key requirements include accurate turn-taking, cross-turn acoustic consistency, and long-form stability, which current models often fail to address due to a lack of dialogue context modeling. To bridge this gap, we present MOSS-TTSD, a spoken dialogue synthesis model designed for expressive, multi-party conversational speech across multiple languages. With enhanced long-context modeling, MOSS-TTSD generates long-form spoken conversations from dialogue scripts with explicit speaker tags, supporting up to 60 minutes of single-pass synthesis, multi-party dialogue with up to 5 speakers, and zero-shot voice cloning from a short reference audio clip. The model supports various mainstream languages, including English and Chinese, and is adapted to several long-form scenarios. Additionally, to address limitations of existing evaluation methods, we propose TTSD-eval, an objective evaluation framework based on forced alignment that measures speaker attribution accuracy and speaker similarity without relying on speaker diarization tools. Both objective and subjective evaluation results show that MOSS-TTSD surpasses strong open-source and proprietary baselines in dialogue synthesis.
Whisper-CD: Accurate Long-Form Speech Recognition using Multi-Negative Contrastive Decoding
Long-form speech recognition with large encoder-decoder models such as Whisper often exhibit hallucinations, repetition loops, and content omissions. These errors can accumulate and be further amplified when the previous segment's transcription is used as decoding context. We propose Whisper-CD, a training-free contrastive decoding framework that contrasts clean-audio logits against negative logits computed from three acoustically motivated perturbations: Gaussian noise injection, silence signal, and audio temporal shift. We aggregate these negatives via the log-sum-exp operator, building a unified multi-negative objective for token-by-token decoding. Across five English long-form benchmarks, Whisper-CD reduces WER by up to 24.3pp on CORAAL and shows 48% faster token generation throughput than beam search. Because Whisper-CD operates purely at inference time, it can be applied as a drop-in replacement to already-deployed Whisper systems without retraining.
WhisperAlign: Word-Boundary-Aware ASR and WhisperX-Anchored Pyannote Diarization for Long-Form Bengali Speech
This paper presents our solution for the DL Sprint 4.0, addressing the dual challenges of Bengali Long-Form Speech Recognition (Task 1) and Speaker Diarization (Task 2). Processing long-form, multi-speaker Bengali audio introduces significant hurdles in voice activity detection, overlapping speech, and context preservation. To solve the long-form transcription challenge, we implemented a robust audio chunking strategy utilizing whisper-timestamped, allowing us to feed precise, context-aware segments into our fine-tuned acoustic model for high-accuracy transcription. For the diarization task, we developed an integrated pipeline leveraging pyannote.audio and WhisperX. A key contribution of our approach is the domain-specific fine-tuning of the Pyannote segmentation model on the competition dataset. This adaptation allowed the model to better capture the nuances of Bengali conversational dynamics and accurately resolve complex, overlapping speaker boundaries. Our methodology demonstrates that applying intelligent timestamped chunking to ASR and targeted segmentation fine-tuning to diarization significantly drives down Word Error Rate (WER) and Diarization Error Rate (DER), in low-resource settings.
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
Make It Hard to Hear, Easy to Learn: Long-Form Bengali ASR and Speaker Diarization via Extreme Augmentation and Perfect Alignment
Although Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in Bengali has seen significant progress, processing long-duration audio and performing robust speaker diarization remain critical research gaps. To address the severe scarcity of joint ASR and diarization resources for this language, we introduce Lipi-Ghor-882, a comprehensive 882-hour multi-speaker Bengali dataset. In this paper, detailing our submission to the DL Sprint 4.0 competition, we systematically evaluate various architectures and approaches for long-form Bengali speech. For ASR, we demonstrate that raw data scaling is ineffective; instead, targeted fine-tuning utilizing perfectly aligned annotations paired with synthetic acoustic degradation (noise and reverberation) emerges as the singular most effective approach. Conversely, for speaker diarization, we observed that global open-source state-of-the-art models (such as Diarizen) performed surprisingly poorly on this complex dataset. Extensive model retraining yielded negligible improvements; instead, strategic, heuristic post-processing of baseline model outputs proved to be the primary driver for increasing accuracy. Ultimately, this work outlines a highly optimized dual pipeline achieving a 0.019 Real-Time Factor (RTF), establishing a practical, empirically backed benchmark for low-resource, long-form speech processing.
A Holistic Framework for Robust Bangla ASR and Speaker Diarization with Optimized VAD and CTC Alignment
Despite being one of the most widely spoken languages globally, Bangla remains a low-resource language in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Mainstream Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speaker Diarization systems for Bangla struggles when processing longform audio exceeding 3060 seconds. This paper presents a robust framework specifically engineered for extended Bangla content by leveraging preexisting models enhanced with novel optimization pipelines for the DL Sprint 4.0 contest. Our approach utilizes Voice Activity Detection (VAD) optimization and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) segmentation via forced word alignment to maintain temporal accuracy and transcription integrity over long durations. Additionally, we employed several finetuning techniques and preprocessed the data using augmentation techniques and noise removal. By bridging the performance gap in complex, multi-speaker environments, this work provides a scalable solution for real-world, longform Bangla speech applications.
ShobdoSetu: A Data-Centric Framework for Bengali Long-Form Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarization
Bengali is spoken by over 230 million people yet remains severely under-served in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization research. In this paper, we present our system for the DL Sprint 4.0 Bengali Long-Form Speech Recognition (Task1) and Bengali Speaker Diarization Challenge (Task2). For Task1, we propose a data-centric pipeline that constructs a high-quality training corpus from Bengali YouTube audiobooks and dramas \cite{tabib2026bengaliloop}, incorporating LLM-assisted language normalization, fuzzy-matching-based chunk boundary validation, and muffled-zone augmentation. Fine-tuning the 2, we fine-tune the pyannote.audio community-1 segmentation model with targeted hyperparameter optimization under an extreme low-resource setting (10 training files), achieving a Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 0.19974 on the public leaderboard, and .26723 on the private test set. Our results demonstrate that careful data engineering and domain-adaptive fine-tuning can yield competitive performance for Bengali speech processing even without large annotated corpora.
tugstugi/whisper-medium model on approximately 21,000 data points with beam size 5, we achieve a Word Error Rate (WER) of 16.751 on the public leaderboard and 15.551 on the private test set. For TaskRobust Long-Form Bangla Speech Processing: Automatic Speech Recognition and Speaker Diarization
We describe our end-to-end system for Bengali long-form speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization submitted to the DL Sprint 4.0 competition on Kaggle. Bengali presents substantial challenges for both tasks: a large phoneme inventory, significant dialectal variation, frequent code-mixing with English, and a relative scarcity of large-scale labelled corpora. For ASR we achieve a best private Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.37738 and public WER of 0.36137, combining a BengaliAI fine-tuned Whisper medium model with Demucs source separation for vocal isolation, silence-boundary chunking, and carefully tuned generation hyperparameters. For speaker diarization we reach a best private Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 0.27671 and public DER of 0.20936 by replacing the default segmentation model inside the pyannote.audio pipeline with a Bengali-fine-tuned variant, pairing it with wespeaker-voxceleb-resnet34-LM embeddings and centroid-based agglomerative clustering. Our experiments demonstrate that domain-specific fine-tuning of the segmentation component, vocal source separation, and natural silence-aware chunking are the three most impactful design choices for low-resource Bengali speech processing.
823-OLT @ BUET DL Sprint 4.0: Context-Aware Windowing for ASR and Fine-Tuned Speaker Diarization in Bengali Long Form Audio
Bengali, despite being one of the most widely spoken languages globally, remains underrepresented in long form speech technology, particularly in systems addressing transcription and speaker attribution. We present frameworks for long form Bengali speech intelligence that address automatic speech recognition using a Whisper Medium based model and speaker diarization using a finetuned segmentation model. The ASR pipeline incorporates vocal separation, voice activity detection, and a gap aware windowing strategy to construct context preserving segments for stable decoding. For diarization, a pretrained speaker segmentation model is finetuned on the official competition dataset (provided as part of the DL Sprint 4.0 competition organized under BUET CSE Fest), to better capture Bengali conversational patterns. The resulting systems deliver both efficient transcription of long form audio and speaker aware transcription to provide scalable speech technology solutions for low resource languages.
Enabling automatic transcription of child-centered audio recordings from real-world environments
Longform audio recordings obtained with microphones worn by children-also known as child-centered daylong recordings-have become a standard method for studying children's language experiences and their impact on subsequent language development. Transcripts of longform speech audio would enable rich analyses at various linguistic levels, yet the massive scale of typical longform corpora prohibits comprehensive manual annotation. Meanwhile, automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based transcription faces significant challenges due to the noisy, unconstrained nature of real-world audio. Previous attempts have assumed that ASR must process each longform recording in its entirety. In this work, we present an approach to automatically detect those utterances in longform audio that can be reliably transcribed with modern ASR systems, allowing automatic and relatively accurate transcription of a notable proportion of all speech in typical longform data. We validate the approach on four English longform corpora, showing that it achieves a median word error rate (WER) of 0% and a mean WER of 16% when transcribing 30% of the total speech in the dataset. In contrast, transcribing all speech without any filtering yields a median WER of 52% and a mean WER of 51%. We also compare word log-frequencies derived from the automatic transcripts with those from manual annotations and show that the frequencies correlate at r = 0.94 (Pearson) for all transcribed words and r = 0.99 for words that appear at least five times in the automatic transcripts. Overall, the work provides a concrete step toward increasingly detailed automated linguistic analyses of child-centered longform audio.