Development and Evaluation of Speech Recognition for the Welsh Language

Abstract

This paper reports on ongoing work on developing and evaluating speech recognition models for the Welsh language using data from the Common Voice project and two popular open development kits – HuggingFace wav2vec2 and coqui STT. Activities for ensuring the growth and improvement of the Welsh Common Voice dataset are described. Two applications have been developed – a voice assistant and an online transcription service that allow users and organisations to use the new models in a practical and useful context, but which have also helped source additional test data for better evaluation of recognition accuracy and establishing the optimal selection and configurations of models. Test results suggest that in transcription good accuracy can be achieved for read speech, but further data and research is required for improving recognition results of freely spoken formal and informal speech. Meanwhile a limited domain language model provides excellent accuracy for a voice assistant. All code, data and models produced from this work are freely available.

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