Augmenting Polish Automatic Speech Recognition System With Synthetic Data

This paper presents a system developed for submission to Poleval 2024, Task 3: Polish Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge. We describe Voicebox-based speech synthesis pipeline and utilize it to augment Conformer and Whisper speech recognition models with synthetic data. We show that addition of synthetic speech to training improves achieved results significantly. We also present final results achieved by our models in the competition.

Spoken Language Corpora Augmentation with Domain-Specific Voice-Cloned Speech

In this paper we study the impact of augmenting spoken language corpora with domain-specific synthetic samples for the purpose of training a speech recognition system. Using both a conventional neural TTS system and a zero-shot one with voice cloning ability we generate speech corpora that vary in the number of voices. We compare speech recognition models trained with addition of different amounts of synthetic data generated using these two methods with a baseline model trained solely on voice recordings. We show that while the quality of voice-cloned dataset is lower, its increased multivoiceity makes it much more effective than the one with only a few voices synthesized with the use of a conventional neural TTS system. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that using low variability synthetic speech quickly leads to saturation in the quality of the ASR whereas high variability speech provides improvement even when increasing total amount of data used for training by 30%.