The Estonian and Slovenian Parakeet and Whisper models have been on the Hub since March. This is the peer-reviewed paper behind them, with the full adaptation ladder, ablations, and a large-scale error analysis.
Quick recap: we fine-tuned Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3 and Whisper-large-v3 on identical data, CommonVoice 17 alone and with ~10 hours per language of synthetic speech (LLM-generated text, LLM-as-judge filtering, TTS). Synthetic speech improves in-domain recognition for every model-language pair, cutting CV17 test WER by 1.3 to 3.7 points over real-data-only fine-tuning. Parakeet, at less than half Whisper's size, reaches the lower WER in every fine-tuned condition. Across 95,070 re-aligned sentence pairs, the architecture largely decides which error types persist, while the adaptation regime mainly changes how many.
๐ฆ Resources
- Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666827026002082
- Parakeet ET:
yuriyvnv/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-estonian
- Parakeet SL:
yuriyvnv/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-slovenian
- Whisper ET:
yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-estonian
- Whisper SL:
yuriyvnv/whisper-large-v3-slovenian
- Dataset:
yuriyvnv/synthetic_asr_et_sl
- Code: https://github.com/yuriyvnv/TTS-Augmented-ASR
If you train ASR for other morphologically rich, low-resource languages, I'd like to hear whether the same error patterns show up.
@reach-vb @ylacombe @hf-audio
#speech #asr #syntheticdata #lowresource #estonian #slovenian